The Empty Copper Sea

Through the meal we talked fishing, and over coffee I said, “Where were you before you came here, Gretel?”

“I came out of the nowhere into the here.”

“We don’t answer questions,” John said earnestly. “That’s one of the rules. She says I could get into real-”

“Hey!” she said. “We don’t have to explain why we don’t answer questions.”

“Okay,” he said grumpily. “But you sure are bossy.”

“There are reasons,” she said. She smiled at Meyer. “We’ve had other visitors.”

“Like Fletcher. Like that damned Fletcher.”

“Hush, dear,” she said.

“A deputy sheriff?” I asked. “Now in Mexico with the insurance investigator?”

“He said they were going there,” John said.

She glared at me, her face darkening in anger. She said, “I think it is pretty damned low to keep digging and digging away at somebody who… who…” She didn’t know how to say it in front of him.

“You’re cute,” I said. “Both of you. You make a cute couple. Speaking about low. Sure, John Tuckerman. Keep your mouth shut. And deprive a very decent hard-luck man named Van Harder from making a living at his trade. There is a smell of money in the wind, lady, and you seem to turn toward it like some kind of weathervane. You came out of the nowhere into the here to brush up an old affair and get closer to the money.”

She stared at me, aghast. “You think I’m his old lady?”

“She’s his sister,” Meyer said. And as soon as it was said, I could see it. Bone structures, coloring. She thumped the table with her fist, making coffee dance in the cups. “I came here to help John any way I can, because there isn’t anybody else left in the world who will help him.”

“In spite of all your marvelous motives and family spirit and so on, Gretel, it still leaves Van Harder on the beach.”

“He ran the Julie,” John said. “Hub put half of one of those horse capsules in-”

“John! Shut up, shut up, shut up! Jesus God! They can nail you for conspiracy to defraud, or whatever the right words for it are. Now tell me, John, what really happened to Van Harder?”

“I guess he must have had that big drink Hub gave him on an empty stomach. Or else he brought some liquor aboard with him and drank it too. He passed out when we were on automatic pilot, and one of the girls got sick and went up there and saw him and came down and told us. We decided we’d better go back to Timber Bay. When we found the pass and started in, Hub went up on the bow and-”

I interrupted him. He had been reciting it. He had learned it by rote. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Van got half a horse tranquilizer. I know the other story by heart too.”

John looked at Gretel for guidance. She said to me, “I guess you can understand why we can’t help your friend. Why John can’t help your friend. The establishment took such a beating, they would be glad to stuff anybody in jail.”

John Tuckerman made a muffled sound. We all looked at him. His eyes had filled and one tear broke and ran down his cheek. “He could have taken me with him,” he said. “Everything would have been all right. if he had to go, he could have taken me. Instead of that bitch architect. That dirty rotten bitch architect.” His voice broke.

Meyer said in his jolliest tone, “John and I are going to clean up here, while you and Travis take a walk on the beach, Gretel.”

She looked at him and then she looked at me, a steady, suspicious, interrogatory look, trying to see through my eyes and into my skull. There was a sudden impact, almost tangible. I wanted to be more than I was, for her. I wanted to stop being tiresome and listless and predictable. I wanted to be thrice life-size, witty and urbane, bright and reliable, sincere and impressive-all for her. She merited better than the pedestrian person she stared at.

The hostility and suspicion faded into a look of doubt, a lip-biting tension. “So come on,” she said, and I had to hurry to catch her halfway up the dune.

We stopped at the crest, the early afternoon sun speckling the sea with silver mirrors, aiming arrows of light at us. To the south, birds worked a moiled area of bait.

“We have to trust somebody,” she said. She looked sidelong at me. “I’ve had terrible luck in the trusting department.” Before I could respond she was off down the slope, leggy and swift, heading south down the beach.

Ten

“YOU CAN’T really appreciate the change in John unless you’d known him before. So quick and funny and exasperating. If he’d just had the motivation, he could have been a successful person. Well, maybe he was a successful person. At least he had sense enough not to try marriage. He would have made a terrible husband. As bad, I guess, as the one I married too young, Billy Howard. I think John has always been more than half in love with Julie Lawless anyway.”

We were two miles down the beach from the cottage. A driftwood weatherworn section of wooden dock projected from the shallow slope of the dune-a shelf for sitting. She poked at the sand with a stick as she talked, making small avalanches.

“He tied his life to Hub Lawless’s life. And when everything went sour for Hub and he decided to run, he shucked John off. John has been an intensely loyal person. He drank for oblivion, and I think he found some… permanent kind. He is… a simplified personality now. At the time of the hearing and the investigation, he was himself. I couldn’t be here then, but I could tell from the newspaper stories. He could handle it. He couldn’t get through that sort of thing now. He can be tricked, like a child.”

“The way I was tricking him.”

“Yes. It made me angry.”

“You didn’t hide it.”

“Short fuse, friend.”

“Short fuse and long talk. You talk around and around it, and you keep on wondering if you should tell me anything, or if you should keep on waffling.”

“I just met you a few hours ago.”

“I came here at Van Harder’s request, to clear his name.”

“You’re a private detective, then?”

“Me? No. Those people have to have licenses and be bonded and carry insurance and report to the law people wherever they go. They charge fees and have office phones and all that. I just do favors for friends. Sort of salvage work.”

“But Van Harder is paying you?”

“No. He offered me ten thousand dollars in time payments if I could do it. He thinks his good name is worth twenty thousand. When I find things for people, I keep half. But I won’t take that kind of money from him. I’ll have to find some way of saving his pride, if I can get his situation reconsidered. He’s spent his life on the water. It isn’t fair that he should be victimized by some sharp operator rigging his own disappearance with other people’s money.”

“And leaving his best friend, as he always called John, flat broke in the bargain.”

“Self-preservation. A strong instinct.”

She poked away at the sand, bent so far forward I could not see her face. I looked at the smooth brown legs, the flow of the complex curves, one into the next, lovely as music. She had shed the work shirt. It lay on the weathered wood between us. The bikini string bit into the skin of her warm brown back, and I followed the way her back narrowed down to her waist, then flared to the hips. I read the calligraphy of the round knuckles of the bent spine, and of the twinned dimples farther down.

She turned sharply and caught me staring at her. She said, “I suppose your hairy pal is worming it all out of John anyway.”

“I could say yes in hopes it would open you up. Actually, I don’t know. He may be leaving it up to you to decide.”

She laughed. “When we were alone he gave me a little lecture on how people have washed their garments, down through the ages. He’s really a nice person.”

“Maybe we both are.”

“I have a track record that tells me not to trust my instincts. I have been undone by scoundrels, sir.”

“And probably scoundrels have been undone by you.”

“Sometimes. Thanks for the confidence. Anyway…” She told me what she had learned from her brother, little by little.

When things had begun to go bad, Hub had begun joking about escape. He and John had made up wild plans, as a sort of running fantasy. But as things got worse, the jokes became strained, and the planning became more serious. John had not learned until very far along in the planning process that it had been, Hub’s wish, all along, to take Kristin Petersen with him, or to meet her there. John had thought this ironic, as the architect was really the person who had encouraged Hub to make the land purchases which had finally foundered him. Apparently, according to John’s observations, the affair between Hub and Kristin was intensely physical, the kind of obsessive infatuation which seemed to blind him to all consequences.

The most delicate and intricate chore had been the conversion, over three months, of assets into cash, with frequent trips to Tampa, Clearwater, and Orlando. They had taken a four-day trip to Mexico in late February, ostensibly to hunt cat in the mountains, actually to arrange for surgery in Guadalajara at a later date, and to set up a hideaway for Hub and Kristin after the operations.

When I asked where, she said that John didn’t know, that he had remained in Guadalajara while Hub flew off somewhere, but John had the impression Hub went to Yucatan.

They had done a lot of the planning right there in the cottage, arguing, picking flaws, finding solutions.

The cash had been hidden at the ranch. On March twenty-second, Hub Lawless had put the cash in the yellow jeep and driven out to the cottage. John Tuckerman had driven out there and picked him up and taken him back into Timber Bay. John had arranged for the two girls to come along on the Julie so that there would be innocent witnesses to the accident. Hub had made certain neither girl saw the powerful tranquilizer in powder form being dumped into Harder’s token drink.

Just when it was about time for one of them, John or Hub, to go topside and “discover” Harder, one of the girls became seasick and went up and saved them the trouble. After she came down, they went up to see, then turned the cruiser around to go back. Hub went below and told the girls what they were doing, and also told them that now they were going into the wind, and it was very cold and ugly up above.

Hub went back up. John had taken the Julie as close inshore as he dared. When they came opposite the harsh gleam of the Coleman lantern John had left lighted on the deck railing of the beach cottage, Hub clapped John on the back, thanked him, shook his hand, and went overboard. When he was in the sea, he quickly yanked the cord that inflated the life belt he was wearing. They had tested it several times in rough water off John Tuckerman’s beach. Hub was confident using it and could make good time through the water.

John piloted the Julie to Timber Bay, went in the pass, thumped the bow onto the sandbar, began yelling for the girls, and threw the life ring over. He stayed and answered all questions, over and over and over. It was very late when he got back to his apartment. In the early morning he drove out to the cottage and to his consternation, saw that the yellow jeep was still there. He found Hub Lawless on the cot in the corner of the living room, gray, sweaty, and short of breath. Hub had the feeling, he said, that some round heavy weight was pushing down on his chest. It was more of a feeling of pressure than of pain. He had been much farther from shore than he had realized when he went overboard. He had struggled for a long time and had finally come to shore, elhausted, a long way south of the lantern light. The cold wind chilled him as he walked up the beach, ond he had a nagging pain in his left arm and shoulder. It was not until he had climbed the dune that he had fainted. He did not know how long he was out, but he did not think it was very long. He got 1limself up the stairs and into the cottage, stripped oft his sodden clothes, and dressed in the fresh diy clothing. The nausea had started then, and the weakness. He did not feel equal to driving the jeep to Tampa, as planned, and anyway he had already missed his early flight from Tampa to Houston and thus also his HoustonGuadalajara connection. The tickets and the tourist card were in the false name he had selected; Steven Pickering, the name he had used with the clinic in Guadalajara.

He told John Tuckerrxlan to drive back to Timber Bay, contact Kristin Petersen, and tell her what had happened and to come to the cottage. In the original plan she had been supposed to hang around for a week mourning Hub, and then go back to Atlanta, where she had lived when they met. Later-originally-she was to fly to Mexico and join him at some unknown place in Yucatan. But now, Hub gave John a sealed note to give her. He told John to conceal the jeep nearby in the brush before he left and to stay away from the cottage for a few days.

When John went back to the cottage, there was no one there. Hub was gone. The jeep was gone. There was no note and no money. John had understood that Hub was going to leave him some of the money, which he was to tuck away in a very safe place and not dip into for as long as possible.

“So they went off together in the jeep? With the woman driving, if he couldn’t.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“What was going to happen to the jeep if they’d followed the original plan?”

“Hub was going to leave the claim check for the jeep and the jeep keys in an envelope at the National Airlines desk, and John was going to get down there somehow and claim the jeep and bring it back and take the back roads to get onto the ranch property, and then just park it somewhere on the ranch, as though Hub had left it there.”

“Why a jeep, not a car?”

“This road and the hard road become almost impassable five miles south of here. A storm tore it all up. A car couldn’t make it, but the jeep could. He was going to come ashore and change, drive the jeep south, and be in Tampa before dawn.”

“Carrying money, lots of money? Oh, sure. No baggage check leaving this country, and no baggage check disembarking in Mexico.”

“Especially for the first-class passengers. And he had been in and out enough times to know the routines.”

“Having the woman leave Timber Bay on the twenty-third, with its being pretty, much common knowledge there was something between them-that made it look more like an arranged disappearance.”

“Yes, it did. My brother worried about that. He says that Hub worked so hard and carefully to make sure Julia would get the insurance money, it’s a shame that all these rumors started. I suppose it was unavoidable. If he couldn’t manage the running all by himself, the woman had to help him.”

“It seems Hub made it to Guadalajara. Deputy Fletcher and the insurance investigator are down there now.”

“Who told them about Guadalajara?”

“When a case like this breaks in the papers, the police get a flood of crank mail and phone calls. They sort them out. Some young woman in Orlando sent an anonymous letter with a color slide to the Sheriff. She had taken the pictures on a Friday, April eighth, at a sidewalk cafe, of a street scene. She recognized the man in the left of the picture later as being the man whose picture was in all the area newspapers. She said she couldn’t come forward because her boyfriend thought she was visiting a friend in California. Sheriff Hack Ames made the connection with the big face-lift and cosmetic surgery business there.”

She stabbed the stick viciously into the sand. “I could spit,” she said. “He sits down there fat and happy, and he left all this ruin behind him. Will they find him?”

“I don’t know. Bringing him back would be something else. We have an extradiction agreement. But he didn’t hold anything up with a gun. Right now there isn’t any warrant out for him that I know of. And if he has any political friends down there, it could take a long, long time.”

“Was that woman in the picture too?”

“No.”

“She must be a real charmer. A dandy person.”

“Hub Lawless must have been vulnerable.”

“Like my dear little husband, Billy Howard, was vulnerable. Vulnerable and full of big schemes. God! I was eighteen when I married him. We got a job managing a ski resort forty miles from the end of the earth, and I learned to ski well enough to teach beginners. I cooked and kept the books and waited table and cleaned the rooms and drove the bus and sold the gear too. We crapped out. Too much snow. They couldn’t keep the roads clear. The customers couldn’t get in. We operated a tennis camp for an old pro who gave the lessons and kept trying to hustle me into the bushes. I cooked and kept the books and waited table and cleaned the rooms and drove the bus and sold the gear, and got to play pretty good tennis. Until the old pro dropped dead on the court and his sister fired us. Shall I go on? Why am I telling you all this?”

“Because I want to know all this.”

“Sure. We ran a summer camp for little rich kids. I taught archery, riding, swimming, diving, woodcraft, judo, finger painting, and track. I cooked and kept the books and waited table and drove the bus and pitched softball. Billy made a pass at one of the young mothers who came up to visit, and she told the owners, and we got hurled out in the middle of August. More?”

“Can there be more?”

“You can believe it. So we got a job running a fat farm for California ladies. A dietician cooked. Local high-school girls waited table and cleaned the rooms. All I had to do was run all the exercise classes, keep the books, keep the weight charts, organize their day to keep them all busy, drive the bus, and so on and so on. So I was taking them on a little jog, and I looked back, still jogging, to see how the stragglers were coming along, and one of them ahead of me fell down, and I tripped over her and broke my wrist. See, it wasn’t set exactly right It’s a little bit lumpy.”

I examined her right wrist. The bone seemed to jut out a little. Her forearm was baked to a warm golden brown, with the fine hairs, scorched white by the sun, lying against the brown with a tender, infinite neatness. I said it didn’t look lumpy.

“We’re coming to the best part,” she said. “I couldn’t keep the books and records. The owners had to hire a bookkeeper. They cut my pay. The bookkeeper was cute. Dear darling Billy ran off with her. She couldn’t even keep the books right. She was one of those helpless ones with the big melting eyes. She sighed a lot. I don’t think she bathed as much as her mother might have wished And the reason I couldn’t come here sooner, after I had seen the whole mess in the papers and called John, was because I was not supposed to leave the state until I got the final papers of divorce. The lawyer said it might gum things up. He said I could go if I wanted, and it would probably be all right But I wanted to be very damned sure that my seven years of marriage were over. Aren’t we supposed to change completely every seven years, all the cells or something? I was ready. Wow, was I ever ready! I put in seven years of sixteen-hour days. Seven years of hard, hard labor.”

“What are you going to do afterward? After all this?”

“When the time comes, I’ll think about it.”

Our eyes caught and held for a few moments. When she looked away I had a very strange feeling. I felt as if I had shucked some kind of drab outer skin. It was old and brittle, and as I stretched and moved, it shattered and fell off. I could breathe more deeply. The Gulf was a sharper blue. There was wine in the air. I saw every grain of sand, every fragment of seashell, every movement of the beach grasses in the May breeze. It was an awakening. I was full of juices and thirsts, energies and hungers, and I wanted to laugh for no reason at all.

I reached and caught the lumpy wrist, and she looked at me with surprise and faint irritation, gave one tug to get away, and then did not resist. I did not have to worry about her reaction. I could make her understand anything.

“Gretel, thanks for telling me all you know. Thanks for trusting me. I’m going to help you with this. Meyer and I will help you, and we’ll get it all sorted out.”

“For half of what?”

“For half of the way you look right now.”

“Come on! You’ve been in the sun too long.” She snatched her work shirt and we headed back. She seemed to have been infected by some of my exuberance. At one point she sprinted away from me, running on the packed sand where the tide had receded. She ran well, and it took a determined effort to overtake her. She stopped when I clapped my right hand on her left shoulder. She was breathing hard, and she inspected me and discovered I wasn’t.

“Good shape, huh?” she gasped.

“Better than my usual. I helped a friend bring a big ketch up from the Grenadines to Lauderdale. Lots of wind, all from the wrong direction. A person could get in the same kind of good shape by spending a month working with weights while rolling downhill.”

“Are you a freak about condition?” She was recovering her wind quickly.

“I guess to a certain extent. I get into situations where it is nice to be quick, and healthy to be persuasive. I get into them oftener than most. If I get bloated and slow, somebody is going to put me out of business. So when I get the slow bloats, I get the guilts, and when I’m in shape I feel righteous and smug-but what I do is keep going from one extreme to the other, and getting it back gets rougher every year. How about you? Freaky?”

“Not really. But I’m sort of a jock. You know, born with good coordination and good muscle memory. I learn physical things quickly. I like competition. I don’t have to tell you I am one big girl. Six foot one-half inch. One hundred and forty-eight pounds of meat. Solid meat. You are one man who doesn’t make me feel all that huge, though. I guess I like to stay in shape because you can do things better, and you feel so much better. It’s kind of a… a hummy feeling. You know your motor is running.”

We went back to the cottage. Meyer was on the veranda deck reading a copy of the Reader’s Digest for July 1936. He said it had a lot of uplift in it. He said he had heard that the ideal article for the Reader’s Digest would have a rather long title: “I Dropped My Crutches, Abandoned My Electronic Submarine, Climbed the Undersea Mountain and Found God.” He said John Tuckerman was napping. He had felt very tired.

John came yawning out as we talked. He sat in an old rocker and nodded from time to time as Gretel told him that she had told me all about the plan he had cooked up with Hub for the disappearance. He did not seem especially concerned.

He smiled at me and said, “I tried to talk Hub out of it. I really did. I told him he was letting all his friends down. He was letting down the people who were still working for him, who were still loyal. He wouldn’t listen. He said everything had gone to hell and there was no way to salvage any of it, except to leave and take what he could with him. All he could really think about was getting into the Petersen woman’s pants. Excuse me, Gretel.”

“Was she all that great?” Gretel asked.

“Depends on what you like,” John said. “She’s kind of pale and round-faced, but with hollows in her cheeks, pale green eyes, soft quiet little voice, silver-blond hair that she braids a lot, and a slender body, but with real big tits. She’s quiet but she’s used to giving orders, and when she tells somebody to do something she has a way of making them jump and do it. She walks into a room and you know she is… somebody. Somebody important.”

“How did she act when you gave her the message?” I asked him.

“Oh, she was upset. She paced around her place, nibbling her thumb knuckle, telling me to shut up whenever I tried to say I was leaving.”

“She had opened the note?”

“Yes, but she didn’t tell me what it said.”

“But the verbal message,” Meyer asked, “as I think you told me before your nap, was to tell her to come out to the cottage, was it not?”

“Yes. To tell her he’d had some kind of mild heart attack and to come out. He told me to stay away from the cottage for a few days and to hide the jeep in the brush before I left.”

“Then,” said Meyer, “the written message had to be some kind of instruction to her, to do something before coming out, because if he was going to see her out there, he would be able to tell her any other instruction. And it had to be something he didn’t want to tell you.”

“I don’t know what that would be. He knew he could trust me.”

“We have one problem to solve first,” Meyer said. We looked at him. He looked very pleased with himself. “It’s so obvious,” he said. “Certainly she didn’t walk out here from the town!”

In the silence, Gretel said, “It’s like that game of logic where you have to get everybody across the river in one boat in so many trips. What kind of car did she have, Johnny?”

“A small rental car. A red Mazda five-door hatchback. Hub rented it for her from Garner Wedley, owns the Texaco station out on Dixie Boulevard and has the franchise for Bonus Rental. I know because I had to take it to be gassed and serviced a few times. It drove nice.”

“Oh, John, did you have to do things like that for him? Putting gas in his girlfriend’s car?”

He shook his head as if in irritation at her denseness. “Honey you just don’t understand. Anything that Hub asked me to do, I was glad to do. It didn’t matter what. I worked for him, and I was his friend too. And I still am, no matter what.”

“Did the Texaco station man get his car back?” I asked. I saw Meyer nod his approval out of the corner of my eye.

John Tuckerman frowned. “My memory has gone so rotten. It seems I remember Garn chewing at me about something or other, about that car. But a lot of people were chewing at me about a lot of things back then, that last little bitty part of March. My feeling is he got it back but there was something wrong with it, wrong with the deal somehow.” We asked some more questions. What sort of container was the money in? It was in a fake gas can chained and padlocked to the rack on the back of the jeep. How much money? Hub never said. But it was a lot. A real lot. Hub said he was sorry he’d never see his daughters again, and never see John again. But a man had to do what he had to do.

Where had the money been hidden out at the ranch? As they had collected more and more of it, turning pieces of paper and equipment and supplies into cash, Hub had kept it in various places, moving it every time he got nervous about it. And the more it got to be, the more often he got nervous.

What did you mean by a fake gas can? It was one of those heavy-duty GI gas cans, tall and narrow and painted yellow like the jeep. There were two of them, and they fitted in brackets in the back, on either side of the spare-tire bracket. Hub had hacksawed a can in half and soldered a flange on the inside of the lower half, so the top half could be fitted back on. He packed all the money in there, put the can in the bracket, ran the heavy-duty rubberized chain through the heavy handle that was part of the top of the can, pulled the chain tight, and padlocked it. From then on he felt easy about the money. He could park it right down near the bank. Whenever he left the jeep, he took the distributor rotor along with him. He made jokes with John Tuckerman about the kind of gas in the gas can. He told John some of it was his and would be left behind.

I said to John, “I suppose you’ve hunted for the money for what he was supposed to leave here for you.”

John looked at me. He wore the somewhat defiant expression of a sly child. “I won’t say.”

“We looked for it,” Gretel said wearily.

“We never did!” John yelled. “Never!”

And from the subtle gesture she made, I knew it was time for us to go.

It was almost four fifteen on Saturday afternoon when we headed back toward Timber Bay.

Meyer said, “I haven’t heard that infuriatingly tuneless whistling of yours for a long, long time. Congratulations.”

“On what?”

“On coming back to the land of the living.”

“It shows? I was that bad?”

“You were that bad, and for a long time. You were, in fact, committing the eighth deadly sin.”

“I was? What is that?”

“You were boring, Travis. Very boring.”

“Oh?”

“Self-involved people are always boring. Nobody can ever be as interested in them as they are in themselves.”

“Sorry about that.”

“You probably couldn’t help it. It’s been coming on since before we went up to Bayside that time.”

“If I’ve been so depressing, why didn’t you just bug off?”

“There was always the chance you’d come out of it.”

“I feel as if I had.”

“She seems to be an exceptional person.”

“Gretel? Yes. Yes, she is. I like these dunes. They give it a nice wild unspoiled look. We’ll have to cruise this coast sometime. Maybe head north from here.”

“What are you smiling at?”

“Me? Was I smiling?”

Eleven

THE LIGHT breeze was out of the southwest. The sky was cloudless. The late afternoon sun was hot. Shopping centers were jammed. So were the beaches and tennis courts. Meyer took the Dodge to go find out about the rental Mazda. I walked north along the uplands above the beach until I came to North Pass Vista.

I walked around the place for a few minutes and located Symphony, where John Tuckerman had lived, and Melody. Each was a cluster of four small two-story town houses. Melody Three was where Kristin Petersen had lived. Someone else was in there. A slight baldheaded man was in the narrow carport, painting a small chest of drawers, biting his lip as he made each careful stroke.

The office was in a unit farthest from the water. There was a sign stuck into the lawn and another over the-doorbell. A man opened the door and looked out at me. He had half glasses and a bootcamp haircut. He looked to be about forty.

“Yes?” he said, managing to inject hostility and disbelief into that single syllable.

“I want to ask some questions about Kristin Petersen, please.”

“I have no interest in answering them.”

As he started to close the door I put my palm against it and gave a hearty shove. It drove him back and banged the door open.

“Hey!” he said. “You can’t force your way in here!” The foyer was a shallow office, with a secretarial desk two chairs, and a gray file cabinet. He picked up the phone and dialed the operator. I took my time finding the To Whom It May Concern card from Devlin Boggs. He asked the operator for the police. I held the card up in front of him. He told the police it was a mistake and he was sorry. He took the card, turned it over and read the message, and handed it back.

“What’s your interest in Miss Petersen?”

“My interest is enough to drop subpoenas on you if I think you are holding back.”

“Oh. You’re an attorney?”

“What is your name?”

“Stanley Moran.”

“Mr. Stanley Moran, I don’t want you to keep asking me questions. I am not here to answer questions. I am here to ask them. Maybe you would like to phone Mr. Boggs and get his opinion on whether or not you should ask me a lot of questions.”

“But how do I know you-”

“Or I can come back with Hack Ames, or Deputy Fletcher, or anybody you might think of who can reassure you.”

“Why are you smiling like that?”

“Because the angrier I get, the more I smile. It’s a form of nervous anxiety. When I break out laughing, I usually hit people.”

He sat down behind the desk, picked a pencil up and put it down, and moved a stapler a few inches to the left to line it up with the edge of the small desk.

“There’s nothing I’ve said or done to get angry at.”

“When did she leave here?”

“Do you know how many times I’ve had to answer-”

“Stanley, I’m smiling again.”

“Oh. She left here on the twenty-third. The precise time cannot be established. She had a visitor at ten thirty that morning. The police were very interested in that, and they finally were able to identify the visitor as Mr. Tuckerman, who was then living in Symphony Four. After he left, she drove out and was gone the rest of the day. People were interested in her movements because of her-coughrelationship with Mr. Lawless, who at that time was believed drowned out in the bay. They were searching for the body. Her car was seen back in her carport at about eleven on the night of the twentythird; however, it was gone when I walked around the area at six the following morning. I rise early. So the assumption is that she departed during the night of the twenty-third, or very very early on the morning of the twenty-fourth.”

“She took everything with her?”

“Well… practically everything. All her personal things, of course. But she left a few things she had bought for the unit. Let me see now. Two very primitive-looking pottery bowls. Ugly things, actually. One small table, of blond wood with the top in set with blue and green tiles. One framed print that I can’t make head or tail of you can hardly tell which way up to hang it. Our storage space here is very limited. There’s a limit to how long I can hold these items. I might say that Miss Petersen was not exactly my favorite tenant here at Vista. She made very disparaging remarks about the decor and the architecture. My wife and I have worked very hard to make these units attractive and livable. She had no reason to call them vulgar. We do not set ourselves up as moral arbitrators or-”

“Arbiters.”

“What?”

“I have been listening to a man named Meyer too long. Go ahead. You were saying?”

“People’s morals are their own affair. But she did, time and again, ‘entertain’ Mr. Lawless here overnight. His car would be parked in her drive and I would sometimes see him leave in the early morning.”

“Shameless!” I said.

“What else do you want to know?”

“Did mail keep coming for her?”

“Yes, until I filled out a permanent change-ofaddress card and signed her name to it. I had it sent to the Atlanta address she gave me when she rented Melody Three. Of course, I have told all of this so many times that-”

“Did she have any particular friends among the other renters?”

“Not one that I know of.”

“And you would know.”

“I like to think so. After the projects for which Mr. Lawless had hired her were indefinitely delayed, we thought she would probably go right back to Atlanta, but she stayed on. She would go over onto our beach for a little while every day, and she would swim in the pool. I know that quite a few men tried to strike up a conversation with her. She was quite… noticeable in her swimming attire. But she’never responded at all.”

“What do you think happened to her, Mr. Moran?”

“Why do you want to know what I think?”

“Why do you always answer a question with a question?”

“Do I? Excuse me. My wife and I think she ran away with Mr. Lawless. We think they are living in Mexico under new names.”

“Why would she leave her profession?”

“Because of being in love with Mr. Lawless, I would guess. Anyway, I don’t know that she was really good at being an architect. They say that the other things she has designed were really not great successes. They say she wasn’t in great demand, actually.”

“Did she leave owing you money?”

“Heavens, no! We ask for the first and the last two months in advance. Technically you could say she was paid up through this month, through May.”

“Did she pay by check on an Atlanta bank?”

“Yes. I can tell you which bank. Just a moment. I noted it on my copy of the lease.”

He got it out of the file. “The first check was for fifteen hundred and sixty dollars, including tax, on Atlanta Southern Bank and Trust, check number eight-twenty, account number four-four-eight, fourfour-one.”

I wrote it down and said, “You keep good records.”

“Thank you, mister-”

“McGee,” I said, moving toward the door. “And thank you for everything.”

“No trouble at all,” he said. “Any time.”

The world is full of contention and contentious people. They will not tell you the time of day or day of the month without their little display of hostility. I have argued with Meyer about it. It is more than a reflex, I think. It is an affirmation of importance. Each one is saying, “I can afford to be nasty to you because I don’t need any favors from you, buster.” It is also, perhaps, a warped application of today’s necessity to be cool. Stan Moran in his half glasses and brush cut and improvised office, managing the Vista in order to save rent, was all too conscious of being nobody, and it had curdled him. I guessed he would have some sort of disability pension from somewhere. Or maybe he was a retired enlisted man who had been company clerk for too many abusive officers. If I were King of the World I would roam my kingdom in rags, incognito, dropping fortunes onto the people who are nice with no special reason to be nice, and having my troops lop off the heads of the mean, small, embittered little bastards who try to inflate their self-esteem by stomping on yours. I would start the lopping among post-office employees, bank tellers, bus drivers, and pharmacists. I would go on to checkout clerks, bellboys, prowl-car cops, telephone operators, and U. S. Embassy clerks. By God, there would be so many heads rolling here and there, the world would look like a berserk bowling alley. Meyer says this shows a tad of hostility.

As Meyer was not yet back, I decided to walk all the way around to the Cedar Pass Marina and take a look at the Julie and have a couple of words with Dee Gee Walloway, resident aboard. It was a fine time of day for walking, and there was lots to look at around that great curve of Say Street. I whistled one of my tuneless tunes, strode my loose-jointed, ambling, ground-covering way, squinted when the sun shone between the buildings on the bay shore. I smiled at a brown cocky city dog and nodded at a fish-house cat nested into a windowsill. Gulls tipped and dipped, yelling derision and dirty gull-words. Steel tools made music when dropped on concrete floors. Cars and trucks belched blue, gunning at the lights. A paste-white lady with sulfur curls, wearing bullfighter pants and a leopard top, slouched in a doorway and gave me a kissy-looking smile. Spillane had shot her in the stomach a generation ago, and she was still working the streets. I told her it was a lovely evening and kept going. Even the wind-sped half sheet of newsprint that wrapped itself around my ankle had some magic meaning, just beyond the edge of comprehension. I picked it off and read that firebombs had crisped four more West German children, that 30 percent of Florida high-school graduates couldn’t make change, and 50 percent couldn’t comprehend a traffic citation. I read that unemployment was stabilized, UFOs had been seen over Elmira, the latest oil spill was as yet unidentified, and, to make a room look larger, use cool colors on the walls, such as blues and greens and grays.

I wadded it to walnut size and threw it some fifteen feet at a trash container. The swing lid of the trash container was open about an inch and a half.

If it went in, I would live forever. It didn’t even touch the edges as it disappeared inside. I wished it was all a sound stage, that the orchestra was out of sight. I wished I was Gene Kelly. I wished I could dance.

I went into the marina office. It was shipshape, clean, efficient-looking. The man in white behind the desk looked like a Lufthansa pilot. “Sir?” he said with measured smile.

“My name is McGee. I phoned from Lauderdale earlier in the week about dock space for a houseboat.”

He flipped through his cards. “Yes. The arrival date was indefinite. I have it here you will arrive between the twenty-fifth, next Wednesday, and the twenty-ninth. Let me see. Marjory took the call. I assume she told you it is no problem this time of year. Fifty-three feet. The Busted Flush?”

“As in poker, not as in plumbing.”

“Length of stay indefinite?”

“That’s correct. I’ll let you people know as soon as I know.” I hesitated, and decided to try it out. “Captain Van Harder is bringing her around for me.”

It did startle him. The eyes of eagles clouded for a moment. The muscles of the square jaw worked. “I probably should not say anything to you. Van is as good as there is around here. I don’t think he should have lost his license. Did you know he had?”

“Yes.”

“This is something a lot of people do not know-if you hire a man to operate your boat and he doesn’t have a license, if there is any trouble, you might have difficulty with your insurance company.”

“I knew him years ago when he fished charter out of Bahia Mar at Lauderdale, before he went into shrimp and had his bad luck. He’s bringing it around as a favor to me. No hiring involved and no passengers aboard. So I think it’s okay.”

He nodded. “I would think it’s okay too.”

“What is the status of the Julie?”

“The legal status? Clouded. The bank has put a lien on her. So she just sits, God knows how long. I know that nobody is going to move her until we get our dock rental. The mate is living aboard.”

“Is he there now?”

He started to say he didn’t know, but a smallish, dark, and pretty woman came in from the room behind the office. He introduced us. She remembered my call. He asked Marjory if she’d seen Walloway leave the marina and she said she thought he was still aboard.

I remembered the Julie from having seen her at Pier 66. She looked even better in the dying day. She sparkled from one end to the other. The brightwork was like mirrors. Varnish gleamed. Lines were smartly coiled, all the fenders perfectly placed. The boat basin had two main docks at right angles to the shoreline, with finger piers extending out on either side of the main docks. Small stuff was moored at the finger piers between the two docks, where there was less maneuvering room. The Julie was on the outside of the left-hand dock, moored to one of the middle finger piers, stern toward the dock, starboard against the finger pier.

A hinged section of rail was turned back amid ships to make space for the little boarding ramp. Its wheels moved very slightly as the breeze moved the hull of the vessel.

DeeGee Walloway came toward the ramp, stuffing his keys into the pocket of his tight whipcord cowboy pants. He wore boots, a silver-gray shirt with lots of piping and pearl buttons, a blue neckerchief, and a Saturday-night cowboy hat. He looked like Billy Carter, except he was half again as tall and twice as broad.

I knew at once why that name had rung a small bell in the back of my head. He stopped and stared at me. He snapped his fingers, rubbed his mouth, shoved his hat back, and said, “McGee!”

“How you, Deej?”

“Son of a bitch! Hey, is Van bringing your houseboat around from the other side?”

“Word sure gets around.”

“What happened, he phoned Eleanor Ann the other day, and she said he sounded a little more up than he has lately, and he told her everything would be working out for him, but I don’t see how the hell it can. He told her he was bringing a houseboat around-and it would take maybe seven or eight days-for a fellow name of McGee he used to know in Lauderdale. So I figured it might just be the same one. I only knew you that one time, but I never forgot it.”

Somebody had brought him to Meyer’s annual birthday chili bash one year. After enough drinks he had decided to whip people. He told me later that it usually came out that way. Not ugly, not loud, not mean. Just an urge to whip people for the fun of it. If I had gotten him fresh, I don’t think I could have handled it. But he had whipped Jack Case and Howie Villetti before Chookie looked me up and told me some jerk named Walloway was spoiling the party. Jack and Howie had put quite a strain on Deej. He had a little sprain in his neck that made him hold his head funny, and he wasn’t going to be able to see out of his left eye much longer. We had the party that year on a sandspit called Instant Island. He was ginning and chuckling. He was a happy man, doing what he liked best. I spent a disheartening fifteen minutes before he finally stayed down. He came at me the next day and, because I had learned his tricks, it took about ten minutes. He came at me the third day, and that was the day I saw one coming at me so late that all I could do was duck my head into it. It broke his hand and left me with double vision for two weeks.

“I just know,” he said, “that I should have been able to whip you.”

“No, DeeGee. No. Get your mind off it.”

“It still bothers me. But what the hell. I’m not in no kind of shape like I was then. Look at the gut on me. And I hardly got any wind at all. You, you look like you’re in training for something. You get yourself lean and mean to come over see old DeeGee Walloway?”

“Get your mind off it.”

“The only way I could take you now is suckerpunch you first. And that isn’t my style. There’s no fun in that.”

“Can you whip everybody in Timber Bay?”

“Pretty much most of them.”

“Nicky Noyes?”

“Oh, hell, yes! He hits like he was throwing rocks, but he don’t aim. What you doing right now? Want to walk around to a couple of places and check the action? We can find us some ass and bring it back here to the boat. It isn’t widespread like you got it in Lauderdale, but it’s around if you look. That’s what I was planning on, it being Saturday night.”

“Can I take a look at the Julie? Don’t mean to trouble you.”

“Hell, no trouble.”

He gave me the tour. I looked it all over. In spite of my protests, I had to look at the engines. He lifted the hatch and shone a light on the big GM diesels. The daylight was almost gone.

“A man could eat off that block there,” he said proudly. “That’s one thing ol‘ Van always yapped about. And I ain’t slacked off an inch since he got busted.”

“What’s going to happen to her?”

“God only knows. The bank is giving me walkaround money for staying aboard her and keeping her up. I expect they’ll get the title cleared and sell her.”

“I understand you were out of town when the trouble happened.”

“That’s right. I was up to Waycross, where I come from. My daddy was bad off. It had been coming on a long time, but he was a stubborn old coot. He got hoarse and it hurt him to swaller. And his neck started getting bigger. My mom noticed that and she nagged him and nagged him until he went to the doctor. Soon as the doctor told him he wasn’t a-going to make it, my daddy started going fast. He was nearly gone when I got there, but he could smile and nod at me, and write words on a pad. You know, I never made that man happy with me. Not one time. I damn almost did when I got into the University of Georgia on a football scholarship, but then I got throwed out of the first two games I got into. I was a right tackle, and then I got throwed out of the school itself, signed on in the Navy, and got throwed out of that for discipline problems. He wanted so bad for me to be somebody. But, shit, I’m all I want to be. I think my daddy lasted two days and a half or so after I heard Mr. Lawless got lost overboard. I was holding his hand there at the end. His hand gave this little quiver and then lay slack. Felt weird.”

I went forward to the spot where Lawless was supposed to have fallen overboard. There was a bow rail, braided cable threaded through stanchions, ending abruptly about eight feet from the bow, where the cable was angled down from the final stanchion and made fast to a fitting in the deck. So, if he was on the starboard side, say about seven feet back from the bow and pointed out to the right, bracing himself for the vessel to turn sharp right, and it had instead turned sharp left, then the angled cable would have hit him in the shins and he would have tripped over into the chop and into the night’s blackness. They had worked the story out nicely.

“Seen enough?” he asked. “Let’s go get a drink McGee.”

As we walked by the lighted office, the little darkhaired lady waved. “Don’t futz with that one there,” DeeGee said. “Marjory is Coop’s old lady He’s the one right there, in the white, runs the place. She acts like she’d fool around, but she doesn’t.”

“What do you think about the Hub Lawless situation?”

“I wouldn’t tell you this if you weren’t my friend. Anybody whips me like you did, they’re my friend. I think they decided there was no way they could buy Van off. He’s straight. So they give him a mickey. Hell I know the routine. Whenever we got rolling, whenever we settled into cruising speed Mr. Lawless would bring a couple of drinks topside one for me and one for Van. He’d check the dials and the course and look around at the weather and either stay with us and have his drink up topside with us, or go on back below with whoever he had aboard.”

“Women passengers?”

“No way. Not even that Norway ass he got mixed up with. Jumpin‘ B. Jesus, but I would have liked me a chop at that one She was steamy I’m telling you She had a fire burned all the time. A tilty little swivel-ass like to break your heart, and she knew it and she waved it. And really great wheels. Mr. Lawless got into that and stopped giving a damn for much of anything else, and no man would blame him too much. But he never brought her aboard. I couldn’t hardly believe that he and John Tuckerman had Mishy and that Mexican friend of hers aboard. Mishy is okay. I’d guess offhand that Tuckerman chopped her once in a while. She isn’t exactly a pro, but she likes to work you, you know? She needs room rent, or some damn thing, or something to send her poor old mother for her birthday. The way I see it, it was easy to give Van a mickey because of the way Mr. Lawless always gave him a drink. The two girls were below, and I think they were just to dress up the act a little. I think there was somebody in a boat waiting for him to jump, and they took him to an airplane somewhere, maybe a seaplane. They say he took off with a million dollars. You can buy a lot of help for a small piece of that kind of money.”

“And he’s in Mexico?”

“Sure. He went there a lot. Him and John Tuckerman, hunting, fishing, horsing around. They were best friends of each other. John has been way into the sauce ever since. Bombed out of his mind. What did he ever have besides being Hub’s best friend?”

“You liked Lawless?”

“Hell, yes. Everybody that worked for him liked him. It really hurt him bad when he had to start laying people off from the businesses he ran. And I know for a fact he was trying to sell the Julie. Some people came aboard and looked her over. But it’s hard to move a boat like that. She won’t suit people with really big money, and she’s too much for the average boat fella. I guess if he’d sold her, he’d have had to disappear some other way that would look like he died, so the insurance would go to Mrs. Lawless and the girls.”

“Did they come out on the boat much?”

“His family? Oh, sure. But a lot oftener before than after things started to get tight for him. I mean you can run a lot of dollars through those diesels just to move that thing out for an afternoon picnic. She’s way overdue for bottom work right now, too. Like the man said, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

He stopped and motioned me ahead of him, and we went into a place called Lucille’s. It was long and dark, with a mahogany bar, a brass rail, sawdust, spittoons, Victorian nudes in gilt frames, bowls of salted peanuts, and a game show on the television perched over the far end of the bar. Lucille squeezed past one of her bartenders to come down toward the entrance and take care of us herself. She was roughly the same size as Walloway, and of only slightly different dimensions. She wore what looked at first glance like a blue bathrobe. She had curly shiny black hair, like a poodle. Her face was white and stiff as wallboard, and she wore lots of eye makeup and lots of burgundy lipstick: I guessed her at about sixty.

“No thumping anybody tonight, Deej!” she ordered in a whiskey contralto.

“Meet my friend name of McGee. He whipped me three times.”

She looked me over. “Looks as if he could do it again if he had a mind to. Welcome to my place. Deej, you start anything, you can bet your bucket I’m calling the law early.”

“I was only funnin‘, honey.”

“What would you done to him was you serious?”

“I’ve never been serious in my whole life. Double Bellows and a Miller’s chaser.” I settled for the chaser. He was almost offended, but I explained I had other places to go and I didn’t want to start more than I could arrange to finish. I said the previous night was still too fresh in my memory, what I remembered of it.

He told Lucille we had been talking about Lawless and Tuckerman. “If I had a shiny dime for every time I’ve heard those names in the last two months, I could quit and live ladylike,” she said.

“Seen John Tuckerman lately?” he asked her.

“No. He’s down to that shack on that land nine miles south Hub bought for his girlfriend to design apartments on, and they say his sister is there and she has got him dried out and she’s keeping him dry, but his brains are still mush. I don’t never want to see him back in here. He was flat-out pitiful. I don’t want to see people that make me sorry I sell the stuff. I don’t need that kind of guilts. I got more than enough other kinds to go around.”

“Did you know Hubbard Lawless?”

“Everybody knew Hub. The business people in this town, of which I am one, aren’t never going to find it, easy to forgive him for what he done to the town. He left us in a depression here. Everything is tied into everything else, and when something quits, other things get hard up on account of it. They say we got fourteen percent unemployment here, and I can feel it in my gross, believe me. But at the same time, everybody knows Hub worked hard to make things work, and he did things for the good of the place too. He contributed to everything when he was doing well. Community Chest, Boys’ Club, Cedar Pass Park, bandstand, the Pirate Pageant. He didn’t keep regular hours. He was out at that ranch by dawn. He’d work at getting stuff shipped in the middle of the night. Nobody ever knew when that man slept. He always had a smile and a little joke. The way it looks to me, when he got the money for Hula Marine, he should have used it to shore up the other businesses instead of buying the wrong land at the wrong time for the shopping center and that condominium thing.”

“What you forget, Lucille,” DeeGee said, “he wasn’t thinking straight. He had a bad case of nooky disease.”

“I don’t allow dirty talk in here, and you know it.”

“I would have said it nice if I knowed how, Lucille, dammit. You know as well as I do that architect woman had him going in circles.”

“Well,” she said, “nobody is perfect, and I hope that wherever he is, Mexico or wherever, he’s found some kind of peace, because he sure got awful jumpy before he took off. The town will make out. People will keep coming down from the north. ‘ 1’hings will keep going. They always have.”

“You have a kind heart, Lucille,” DeeGee said.

“Not kind enough to set you up a freebie.”

“Okay. Hit me again anyway. Same thing. You, McGee?”

I excused myself and left. He seemed disappointed to have me go. I imagine he got over it in about forty seconds. It would take him about that long to get a good look at the two young women who were going in as I was leaving.

Twelve

I FOUND Meyer in a booth in the lounge. Business was better than usual. Billy Jean Bailey was tinkling away at her compulsory background-music stint, with no one listening. She looked at me and through me, with no change of expression, and looked away, smiling and nodding at someone else.

After I brought a drink back to the booth, Meyer reported on the rental Mazda.

“I had to wait quite a while for Mr. Wedley. He was out with the tow truck on a pickup. Shorthanded. The boy pumping gas did not know anything about anything. When Wedley came back he was busy on the phone for ten minutes. Finally he was able to tell me about the Mazda. Five days after Lawless disappeared, he got a collect call from airport administration at Orlando. The car had been left in rental car return with the keys behind the sun visor. No one knew when it had been left. Airport administration got into it when Hertz complained that it was their space and they needed it.

“Garner Wedley’s Texaco station address and phone was on the key tag, so they had phoned him and he had arranged to get it picked up. He said that Bonus Rental was a small operation and he had an area franchise, and it said on the rental contract that the car had to be returned to him, but it wasn’t. It made him angry to talk about. He said that Hub had rented it for that Scandihoovian female of his, and it worked out to ninety-five seventy-five Hub owed him that he would never see. He told the Sheriff about it, and after an investigation the Sheriff said that it was reasonable to assume that Miss Petersen had driven the car to Orlando, arriving during the morning of the twenty-fourth. He had obtained a picture of her, from the files of the Bay Journal, taken when Lawless had given a press party to announce the plans for the new shopping plaza, and had carried the picture over to Orlando and questioned the airline personnel, but found no one who remembered her. He questioned the rental-car people as well, because it has apparently become a popular device to abandon an automobile in an airport parking area and immediately rent another and drive away. Did you know that?”

“Not until this minute.”

“If there is any point in it, I suppose we could get one of those pictures from Walter Olivera. But we seem to be getting far afield from Van Harder’s problem.”

“We are and we aren’t. I don’t think anybody in authority would take anything Tuckerman might say seriously enough to get Harder some kind of reconsideration. One thing we might do is ask that doctor if Harder’s symptoms were consistent with the brand of horse tranquilizer Lawless used at the ranch.”

Meyer looked into his notebook, thumbing the pages over. “Here it is. Dr. Sam Stuart. Tuckerman’s doctor too, apparently. Shall I make a note of that for Monday? And do it myself?”

“Who else have you got written down there, that we should see?”

“There’s Van Harder’s wife. Eleanor Ann Harder. She’s a nurse at Bay General. And the insurance investigator. I found out his name, by the way: Frederic Tannoy. The company is Planters Mutual General. Tannoy is a troubleshooter for a consortium of middle-sized insurance companies, working on a fee-and-percentage basis. The local agent who sold the policies is a general agent named Ralph Stennenmacher, in the Coast National building.

“Tannoy is with that deputy in Mexico,” I said. “Meanwhile, I’ll see Stennenmacher on Monday.”

B.J. Bailey walked past our booth, giving me one brilliantly venomous glance as she went by It depressed me. I often wonder what basic insecurity I must have to make me so anxious for approval. I touched the tape over my eye. It had not been entrapment, or even pursuit. No promises made. It had been a happening, not important, happening only because of the time and the place and the shared, nagging sense of depression. There in the yellow-glowing darkness she had been small, limber, greedy, slightly sweaty, her hair stiff from sprayings, humming with her pleasures and making them last. I knew the reason for the hate. No matter how she thought of herself, she was a se verely conventional little person and could not accept pleasure for the sake of pleasure, but had to cloak it in romantic rationalization. Like one of her lyrics-it must be love because it feels so good.

I found it ironic that I shared her disease, that puritanical necessity to put acceptable labels on things. The quick jump had always made me feel uneasy. Life cannot become a candy box without some kind of retribution from the watchful gods. I had shared her bed with such a familiar anticipation of the uneasiness that would follow that I had been unable to enjoy her completely. This is the penalty paid by the demipagans, always to have the pleasures diluted by the apprehensions, unless all the labels are in order.

She had found the only label which permitted her all the customary fictions. She was woman betrayed by a scoundrel, a low fellow who had won her with promises, promises, and then turned his back on all her bounty. I leaned out of the booth and looked for her, saw her in the center of a small group of men, laughing with them, drinking with them, eyes a-sparkle. I decided that, when the chance occurred, I would give her a further fiction to apply like a fresh dressing to her pride. Maybe I was in danger and sought to avoid endangering her. Or I was an alcoholic, or dying of something, or had a wife and six kiddies-anything, in fact, which would fit into your average morning soap opera as something worth dramatic dialogue. Meanwhile I would have to accept being an object of hatred, one of your good old boys, one of your male-chauvinist-pig types that went around thinking of women as being something you used when you felt the need, receptacles rather than persons.

“As I was saying,” Meyer said.

“Sorry about that.”

“Now that I have your attention, let’s go over the actual movements of the vehicles and people, as we understand it at the moment. Let this matchbook be the beach cottage. And this one be the Vista. And this one way over here is Orlando. This match is the jeep. This match is the car Tuckerman no longer has. This match is the Petersen Mazda. Here is Tuckerman driving down to the cottage on the morning of the twenty-third to find that Lawless is still there, and sick. Here he goes back to the Vista. He stays there. Kristin goes down to the cottage in the Mazda, let us say in the late morning of the twenty-third. Tuckerman stays away, as Lawless asked, and goes back on the twenty-fifth or -sixth, and finds nothing. The Mazda had been driven to Orlando, where it was discovered on the twentyseventh. Now let’s see how many assumptions we can make about the vanished jeep.”

“How many? Lawless recovered enough to drive it on south, over that bad portion of the road, down to Horseshoe Beach, and then he cut over to the main road, and went on down to an airport somewhere, and flew to Mexico.”

“And if he didn’t recover enough to drive?”

“Let me see. Kristin drove to the cottage on the afternoon of the twenty-third. She finds he is too sick to drive. If he wasn’t, they could have stayed with the original plan, for her to hang around mourning her drowned boyfriend for a week or so before following him to Mexico. But with him too sick, she goes back to the Vista after dark packs, loads the stuff into the Mazda, and comes down and gets him. She could have had him in the back with the luggage, covered with a blanket or something, when they went back through town. They abandoned the Mazda in Orlando, took a flight to Miami, let’s say, traveling separately, and flew Mexicana from there over to Cancun, Yucatan.”

“You’ve developed an interesting point, Travis. About their adhering to the original plan if he was well enough to drive the jeep. But what happened to the jeep, if we follow your scenario?”

I shrugged. “Ran it into the swamps or into a deep pond.”

“If he wasn’t well enough to drive, he wasn’t well enough to hide a jeep.”

“I see her as an intelligent woman, and physically competent. It wouldn’t be anything she couldn’t handle.”

“Let me change your scenario in one respect. Rather than make two trips out to the cottage in a conspicuous red car, she could have brought Lawless back in with her when she packed up her belongings and left her apartment.”

“I’ll buy that. It was dark when she drove back. It’s a better guess than two trips.”

We sat at the booth, staring at the matchbook covers and the matches. “Whichever,” I said, “he got to Mexico.”

“Whichever,” Meyer said, nodding.

There was a deep-throated din of male voices in the big room. Piano tinkle had begun again. I did not want the half drink left in my glass. My stomach felt close to rebellion. This room was not real. It seemed misted and murky, like the contrived visuals in French movies of the second class. Nine miles south reality began, in the long flowing line, that most gentle curve, of the top of a caramel thigh. It began in flecks of gold set close to the black pupil. It began with that elegant balance of the upper body on the pelvic structure, moving in grace to a long long stride.

“Who was Gretel?” I asked Meyer.

“She was pretty shrewd. She held an old chickenbone out of the cage for the witch to feel, to hide the fact she was getting plump enough to cook and eat.”

“How about a nice beach picnic tomorrow?”

“Nine miles from here?”

He looked at his notebook again. “Eleanor Ann, Stennenmacher, Dr. Stuart.”

“Monday we see them. Okay? Monday.”

When we walked out of the place, Noyes lurched into me. It seemed half intentional, half inadvertent. He was sweating heavily. His pistolero mustache looked dank and defeated. He had a pale blue guayabera on, so wet the matted chest hair showed through it. The flinty little Neanderthal eyes stared at me, hostile and slightly unfocused.

“B.J. told me the whole thing, you son of a bitch.”

“Hey. Take it easy.”

“Don’t tell me how to take anything, nark.”

“Nark?”

“And it’s supposed to look like I resisted arrest, right? You don’t like people out on bail, right?”

“You must be drunk.”

“Check with Mitch. I haven’t had drink one.”

“Get out of the way, please.”

“You think I’m going to let you kill me?”

“‘You are boring us, Nicky. You are boring me and you are boring my friend Meyer. And you were boring the people at your table at the Cove last night You are making a new career out of boring people.”

“You want to come outside?”

“Walloway says you can hit, but you can’t aim. Save yourself a short walk.”

He stepped sideways to catch his balance, putting a hand out to grab at the edge of the bar. He muttered something I could not quite hear.

We left. Meyer said we were in a rut, but we might as well try the Captain’s Galley again. We were in no special hurry. I looked back and was surprised to see Nicky Noyes, burly in the shadows, following us toward the lot. I stopped and he stopped. Meyer missed me and turned and saw him.

“What’s he going to do?” Meyer asked.

“Nothing at all. Trying to bug me a little, I guess.” We went on and he followed. When I looked back again, he was angling over toward his pickup truck. As we neared the gray rental Dodge, I heard the pickup door chunk shut. We reached the Dodge. Meyer reached for the door handle on the passenger side as I took a stride to walk around the front. I heard a very small squeak of tennis shoe rubber on asphalt. I heard a dual snick-snick, oily and metallic and horridly efficient. There is some good elemental machinery in my skull, left over from the million years of hunting, of eating and being eaten. I am delighted to have that machinery. If I didn’t have it, I would long since have been forcibly retired from my line of work. Primitive computers worked out the direction of the sound, the distance, the probable angle of fire. I spun and dived in a flat trajectory at right angles to the line of fire. My shoulder hit the partially open door and slammed it shut again, a microsecond before I hit Meyer at mid-thigh and tumbled him and myself all the way back to a point six feet behind the right rear wheel. There was a bright-throated blam-blam, two great sounds not quite simultaneous, deafeningly close to us, and as I rolled up to one knee I saw Nicky Noyes stagger back and fall heavily.

He broke the gun open, fumbled something out of his pocket, snapped the old shotgun shut again just as I ran through the powder stink, caught the warm double barrels, and ripped it out of his hands.

“Kill you!” he yelled in a raw high voice as he was struggling up. “Kill you!‘ He turned and ran. For a fellow so unsteady on his feet, he was running pretty good. He was barreling right along. He ran right toward the long curve of Bay Street. Traffic was heavy and fairly fast.

“Oh, no,” Meyer said softly, beside me.

Nicky tripped slightly just before he reached the curbing. He went out into traffic in that head-down, forward-tilting manner of the fullback when it’s third and one. He ran his head, shoulders, and chest across the hood of a big pale Cadillac, and the front right post of the windshield hit him at waist level. It was slanted enough to hurl him into the air, and more slanted after it had done so. It was almost horizontal, with the white roof buckled into big lumps. His momentum and the impact threw him farther out into traffic, with one sodden bounce and then a floppy roll. Tires of a half-dozen vehicles screamed torment. There were two heavy metallic chunking noises of rear-end collisions, also some thinner sounds as grilles gnashed at fenders.

The pale Cadillac had swerved violently to the right to miss running over what remained of Noyes. It came across the curbing and wedged itself between a pair of young banyan trees. People began the yelling and the screaming. People ran out of the North Bay Resort. A car horn began a seemingly endless braying.

I put the shotgun on the front seat of the pickup. I trotted after Meyer. A trucker was lighting some Highway flares and setting them out. Meyer hurried toward Noyes, then swerved and galloped to the pale Cadillac. It hadn’t wedged itself between the trees as far as the doors. In the reflected brightness of headlights and the red glow of the flares, I saw a white-haired man slumped against the horn ring and, beyond him, crouched low under the bent post and car roof, a plump blond lady. When Meyer eased the man back off the ring, the huge hornnoise ceased.

“He ran right in front of us!” the woman shrilled. “Right in front of the car!”

Meyer stuck his fingers into the side of the driver’s throat. He looked at me and shook his head. And so, ignoring the woman, we tugged that old gentleman out of his Cadillac and stretched him out supine on the nearest flat ground. Meyer knelt on the left side near the shoulders and put his left hand under the nape of the man’s neck, his right palm on the man’s forehead. He pulled up on the neck and pushed down on the forehead to give the head a pronounced backward tilt and clear the airway. He put his ear close to the man’s mouth and looked along the chest as he did so, to detect any movement. I knelt at the man’s right side and found the place to brace the heel of my right hand, two finger widths above the sternum, left hand atop right hand, elbows straight and locked. Meyer checked the pulse again and gave three quick exhalations into the man’s mouth, holding the nose clamped shut with the thumb and finger of his right hand.

After the third exhalation, I began my chore, pushing down hard and releasing, saying my cadence out loud. “One-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-five-and-one-and-two-” I pushed down on the number, released on the “and.” The cadence was ninety pushes a minute. When the heart stops, irreversible brain damage starts after four minutes. I guess he’d been about forty seconds to a minute from the time of cardiac arrest until we went to work on him. The air we breathe in is about 21 percent oxygen. The air we exhale is about 15 percent oxygen. Meyer was oxygenating the lungs. I was pumping the heart by compressing it between the sternum and the spine. Done properly, this can establish a blood pressure and an oxygenation of the brain adequate to sustain the brain undamaged.

The woman was not making things any easier. She had crawled out of the car and was dancing around us, yelling, “Get a doctor! Get an ambulance! Stop that! Stop that this minute!”

She tugged at me and then at Meyer, and between breaths he yelled at her, “I am a doctor, madam!”

“Is he dead?” she yelled. “Is he? Is he?”

We had attracted a part of the crowd. The crowd was fragmented, watching different parts of the show, as at a carnival midway. A couple of women in our crowd grabbed the wife and hauled her away.

I kept counting, and at one point I felt a gentle crackling sound under my hands and knew it was some ribs going. When it is properly done, you will almost always break some ribs. The choice is clear-a dead person with nice whole ribs, or a potentially alive person with some rib fractures. I checked the position of my hands and kept going. I wondered where the hell the official medics were. Suddenly the unconscious man vomited. Meyer, leaning toward him, caught quite a bit of it. Meyer did what everyone does in such circumstances. He turned aside and threw up too. A husky kid about sixteen dropped to his knees beside Meyer and swabbed the man’s mouth with tissue, rolled his head to the side and then back. Meyer tried to give the next breath and couldn’t manage it. The kid muscled him aside and took over, doing the job with perfect timing. It is essential not to break the rhythm, because it can set the person way back. Meyer got up slowly, gagging and coughing. I heard the sirens coming. We kept going. Though it seemed longer, I imagine we gave that man cardiopulmonary resuscitation for about twelve to fourteen minutes before the medics moved in with their specialized equipment and their direct electronic links to hospital Emergency.

Ambulances were soon leaving. Tow trucks were untangling the torn metal. The flares were extinguished, traffic resumed, and the spectators began drifting away.

The kid said, “That’s the first time I used it for real. You done it often, mister?”

“Second time for me. The first was a drowning. Didn’t make it.”

“You take the CPR course?” he asked.

“Nobody should ever try cardiopulmonary resuscitation without taking the course. You could do more harm than good.”

“That’s what they told us too. You think that old guy will make it?”

“I hope so,” I said. I saw B. J. Bailey heading back toward the main building of the Resort, and I hurried and stopped her by clamping a hand on her shoulder.

She turned and said, “And what the hell do you want?”

“I want to know how you got Nicky so charged up about me. What the hell did you tell him?”

“I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Listen to me, Billy Jean. Whatever you told him, it made him come after us with a shotgun. He shot to kill. Believe me. He missed. He tried to reload. I took the gun away from him. He ran out into traffic and got hit and killed.”

“Killed!” she said, aghast. “You’re joking. You got to be joking.”

“You killed him, Billy Jean.”

We stood near a driveway lamp, and it shone pale yellow across her small face. Her mouth broke and she hunched her shoulders high. “No, I didn’t! I didn’t! I told him you came here after him. He gets kind of weird about maybe there are people after him. He’s on crystal. It makes people like that. I thought he would fight again, is all. I thought maybe he’d beat you up this time. I didn’t think he would… oh, no. Oh, no.”

She stood hunched and sobbing.

I gave her some clumsy pats on the back and said, “Look I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings last night.”

“You came back here with…”

“I know, I know. That was dumb. I do some very dumb things like that. Frequently. Forget you ever knew me.”

“I can’t stop thinking about Nicky. I just can’t. I can’t work tonight. Oh, Jesus. Look. One thing. You get the hell away from me. Okay? Get away and stay away. Okay?” She glared up at me out of her grief swollen face. I stood and watched her walk away.

Meyer came up behind me and said, “More diplomacy?”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m going up to the room Where will you be?”

“Right here, waiting for the Sheriff.”

“You called?” Sheriff Ames said, at my elbow. He said we could both come with him-sit in his car and chat a while. I explained Meyer’s problem, and he pointed to where he was parked and let Meyer go to freshen up for a few minutes.

Thirteen

I TOLD him the story while we sat in his car waiting for Meyer to return. When Meyer returned, he had Meyer tell it again. He got the shotgun out of the pickup and found the right barrel loaded with a fresh shell of number 12. We went over and studied the rental Dodge. The first barrel had blown a hunk the size of a cantaloupe out of the right front tire at seven o’clock. For a time we couldn’t find where the second one had gone, and it was Meyer who spotted the tiny streaks of ricochet atop the mound of the trunk cover. So he had been swinging it when he fired, and the first one had slain the tire and kicked the muzzle up, so that only the bottom few pellets of the pattern touched the trunk when the rest of them sailed off toward the tennis courts. I could estimate that the second pattern had been directly over us as we tumbled past the rear of the car. I had one skinned elbow and the knee was gone out of my slacks. Meyer had taken a crack on the back of the head and slid through grease on his behind.

Ames drove us to the hospital, and we went in through Emergency. Meyer and I sat in wicker chairs in a small waiting room while Ames went wandering off after information. The clock ticked. Nurses rustled by. A child was crying. The available magazines were devoted to health, diet, maintaining the right attitude toward life, and how to manage a hospital. Two young, thin black girls came in and sat on the couch, hugging each other and sniffling. A nurse came and got them, and a little while later I heard a terrible grieving desolate scream, and wondered if it had come from one of them.

Ames sauntered back in, pale, worn, and dusty-looking, a drab man of no particular emphasis or importance. He sat and said, “They’re still working on Noyes, still operating on him, but I get the feeling they’re giving up. Now they’re doing what’s called the practice of medicine, with Dr. Ted Scudder running the show. He’ll come on down here shortly, I’d say.”

“What about that old man?”

“That was a Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker Davis, from Watertown, New York, looking for a place to retire. Safe to say it won’t be here.”

“Was?” Meyer asked. “Or is?”

“Oh. Sorry. Is. At least for now. They’re breathing for him, but they’ve got heart action. He’s in cardiac intensive care, all wired up to the machinery.” He turned so as to look directly at Meyer, frowning. “His wife says a man who looks like you, who worked on him, and who would be you, wouldn’t it? He said he was a doctor. There’s a law I’d have to look up about impersonating a licensed profession.”

“I’m a doctor,” Meyer said. “I didn’t tell her my specialty.”

“What would that be?”

‘’Economics. I misled Mrs. Davis. Guilty. She was trying to interrupt the CPR.“

“They say you knew what you were doing.”

“We are DC Number Two Basic Rescuers, both of us,” Meyer said proudly. He gave me a smug nod. I sighed. He had insisted. He had nagged at me until I agreed. What was the result? Two dreadful hours of hard labor on a drowned and dark blue girl before finally the professionals had shown up and told us we were wasting our time. She was gone. And now a dying old man whose ribs I had broken. Great.

A round, weary, red-faced man dressed in operating-theater green came scuffing in and collapsed into a wicker chair. There was a brown splatter of blood across his chest. His plastic mask dangled. He shoved his little green hat back, took his glasses off, and began cleaning them on a tissue. “Official time of death, Hack, make it nine twenty-five. Ten minutes ago. But he was dead as chopped liver the minute the car hit him. Busted all to hell inside. Ripped and ruptured. Liver, spleen, kidney, bowel. He was nearly torn in half. The certificate will say internal injuries.”

The Sheriff introduced us, explaining that we were in town on business, seeking to arrange the purchase of some of the Lawless holdings.

The Sheriff said, “I told them up there I want a blood sample and urine sample to go to the lab. Damn fool ran right into traffic. Check for booze and foreign substances, I told them, and they’ll tell my deputy when he gets over here.”

Scudder got up and sighed. “My turn in the barrel. Four to midnight. I draw that one on Saturday night once every five weeks. Try to keep everything quiet for the rest of my tour, Hack.”

“Try to.”

We checked on Mr. Whittaker Davis again before leaving. No change. Because there was a fatality, possibly two, Ames vvanted our statements on tape. He said they’d be typed up for signature in the next few days. Probably by Tuesday afternoon.

He made it sound like routine, but once he got me into his office and over at a small conference table at the side, with the tape all hooked up and tested, with me on record as saying I was giving the information of my own free will, he did more digging than I had anticipated. He covered my first encounter with Noyes, the absurd fight in the parking lot, the second encounter at the Cove, and what had been said back and forth on all occasions. And the third and final encounter. Very final for Nicky Noyes.

Hack Ames was good at his job. He had all the tricks. For a time I found myself going along in his rhythm, but then the alarm bells began to sound and I hauled back on my own reins. A good questioner will ask a question, get what sounds like a complete answer and sit there in silence, mildly quizzical, until you qualify or add to the answer. A good questioner will ask very simple questions requiring short and simple answers and slowly increase the pace until when he throws a curve, the silence seems to last too long, and you feel a compulsion to give an answer quickly. Any answer. A good questioner will ask a dozen questions about situation X, and then a dozen questions about situation Y, and finally he will start a series about situation Z, but the fifth question may be about Y and the seventh may be about X, questions you have already answered, but phrased just a bit differently. A good questioner will give you back your answers, twisted very slightly, and wait for the corrections. And he will ask you a question that is absurd, or grotesque, stop you before you can answer, and throw in a much better question while you are still off balance from the earlier one. There is always this problem. If you can know and anticipate and deal with the skilled questioner, you slowly begin to realize that you are doing so much bobbing and weaving that, in itself, it becomes significant. You cannot start refusing to answer. You cannot fake anger. You become aware of little inconsistencies here and there, and he gives you no chance to patch them up.

He turned off the recorder. He scratched at his dusty head, yawned, and said, “You’re almost good enough, McGee.”

“For what?”

“For playing games with tired old county sheriffs on a Saturday night.”

“No games.”

“Unless a fellow is trying to borrow money Dev Boggs will just about believe anything you want to tell him.”

“Meyer has a letter from-”

“I saw the letter he left with Boggs. I phoned that big man Friday afternoon, that Allbritton. Never could get him. Imagine if I got him, he’d back it up, but that letter, you know, doesn’t really say much of anything. I checked back through your registration there at the North Bay Resort, and I called a friend over in Fort Lauderdale. He looked around and called me back. You two keep a low profile over there. This Meyer seems to make out doing talks at conferences and being a consultant once in a while.”

“He’s sort of an investor.”

“Sure. And you are sort of a salvage consultant or some goddamn thing. And Billy Carter is a field hand.”

“What are you trying to say to me, Sheriff?”

He cracked his knuckles and blinked his tired brown eyes. “What I am saying is that I get sick of being insulted. I’ve got a job here and I do it and I do it damn well, if statistics mean anything. For two months now I’ve had federal employees and state people coming into Dixie County and padding around, fumbling into this and that, screwing up the detail, living on travel and per diem, without the courtesy of checking in with me. A lot of them are supposed to be officers of the law, though what law and what office is often hard to tell. The general attitude is maybe I am involved in whatever it is they are overpaid to try to look into. Or I am some dummy barely competent to set up speed traps and arrest drunks. Hub Lawless is responsible for a whole batch of them coming in. I am getting tired of it, McGee. I am going to start throwing asses into the little slam here, and I can’t see any special reason why I shouldn’t start with yours. The way I read you, you are either U.S. or state level, and you are over here on the Lawless matter, or you are here on the new drug thing, and the one phone call I’m going to let you have, it better work out because you’re not going to get two.”

“Wrong on all guesses,” I said.

“Bullshit, McGee! You think I don’t know when a man is being evasive? You think I can’t recognize fancy footwork?”

“Okay, okay. Van Harder asked me to come over and see if I could find out enough to get a rehearing on his license. He’s bringing my houseboat around. I got a reservation for it at the Cedar Pass Marina.”

He looked startled and incredulous. “You some kind of lawyer?”

“No.”

“Licensed investigator?”

“No. It’s just a favor for a friend.”

“A friend? How come Harder is a friend of yours?”

“Because he fished charter out of Bahia Mar. He had the Queen Bee Number Three. He sold her to a man named Fazzo when he went into shrimping. Harder was already there when I began living there. All the permanent people around a marina know each other.”

“Why did he ask you? What qualifications have you got?”

I waited a while on that one and finally said, “Indignation.”

“All right! Okay! It’s justified. It wasn’t at the time. At the time, McGee, it looked exactly like what it was supposed to look like, a reformed drunk who fell off.”

“And his friendly Sheriff tried to kick him back up onto his drunken feet.”

“I’ve been sorry about that ever since. I did it because I was angry, dammit. I like Van. It scalded me he should be such a jackass. Since then things have shaped up different. I’ll go along with what he kept saying, that there had to be something in that drink Hub took up to him. All the rest of it was staged too perfect. Van could have come to me. I mean it. He can come to me and I can get that license give back to him, and I kindly think I’ll go ahead and get it done anyway without his asking.”

“Sheriff, if you really know Van, you know why he won’t come to you.”

For just an instant he looked puzzled, and then he nodded. “I know. I kicked him. Not hard or anything. But I kicked him. You don’t kick a man like Van Harder. Those people that gave Hub a dollar and a half of work for every dollar of pay, they’ve certainly got cause to despise that man. Harder, Noyes, all of them.”

We sat in silence. I wondered what on earth Meyer would be thinking, sitting out there waiting. “I ought to chase your ass right out of my county,” he said. “I really should.”

“Mr. Boggs still has Meyer’s letter.”

“Don’t try to keep conning me with that. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Maybe you decided to help Van Harder out because you knew about this case and thought you might run across some money.”

“The thought crossed my mind, Sheriff.”

He grinned for the first time. “Crossed a lot of minds. But it has all pretty much died down. It’s pretty certain Hub is in Mexico and he took it with him, and got that lady architect with him too. Walking hand in hand into the Mexican sunset. Smiling a lot. Hard to believe Hub Lawless did that to his own town, to all of us. Wife, kids too. With them, of course, he told himself the insurance would take care of them. Except, on a big policy, they look for any loophole to keep from paying off.”

“But you don’t know all the answers yet, Sheriff. Things don’t quite fit.”

He tilted his chair back and stuck his thumbs inside his belt. He squinted at the desk top and said, “Now if I wasn’t tied hand and foot by the restrictions of this office, I could churn around here and there, telling lies, making jokes, pushing buttons, hustling and scrambling. Maybe some pieces would fall out of the box and I’d get to know more. No! Don’t tell me you understand a damned thing, because I don’t want to hear anything about your understanding. There isn’t any understanding. You might come back in here some day and have a chat, if you have some interesting conversation. I get bored a lot in here. I spent fourteen years in a car out on the roads. It gets tiresome in here.”

“Before I go, it was kind of a shock to have Noyes trying very hard to kill me, or both of us.”

“It knocked Nicky way off balance when Hub took off. He went away for a little while and came back with merchandise. We knew he was dealing, and we got a pretty good customer list. It’s easier to keep your finger on a network you know than to try to unravel the next one that starts up. He got to hitting his own goods. Dr. Sam Stuart knows more about it than I do. He’s worried all to hell lately. Something the kids are taking. We had a thirteen-year-old girl sit on a gravel pile last month and swallow gravel, a chunk at a time, until she had four pounds of rock in her belly. Weird. God only knows who’ll take over where Nicky leaves off. Maybe the others we got will just start handling more.”

“Meyer is waiting out there.”

“Oh, sure. Send him in. It will only be a few minutes for him. I’ll expect to see you around?”

I nodded. Meaning clear. See me around or he would come and get me. I went out and sent Meyer in. I sat and waited. A sturdy woman typed slowly. I could just hear the dispatcher. A gigantic deputy came in slowly and said to the woman, “What’s it about?”

“You know what it’s about.”

“Not the damn charts again. Don’t tell me it’s the charts.”

“You’re sixteen over again, Rudy.”

“But, damn it all, I’m not fat!”

“He says you got to be no more than two twenty-five. Weren’t you in high school with Nick Noyes?”

“Junior and senior. Four years of him.”

“He’s dead.”

“No shit, Marie! OD’d?”

“Hit by a tourist Cadillac while crossing the street.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

Meyer came out, and the deputy went in to take his chewing for being overweight. We went out and suddenly realized we had no transportation. After we phoned a taxi and stood waiting, Meyer said, “What took you so long in there?”

“He thought I was being cute about something, so he went around and around, coming in at me from new angles. He finally decided I was some kind of out-of-town law, so I told him why we’re here.”

“So he said go back to Lauderdale?”

“Almost. Not quite. Without saying so, he sort of appointed me official cat’s-paw.”

“How nice for you!”

“I didn’t tell him what we’ve got so far.”

“Which is next door to nothing at all. What we know changes nothing.”

“It locates Lawless as of the next morning, ashore and alive.”

“Which he is conceding anyway, Travis,” Meyer said, opening the cab door.

We stopped at the Galley to make certain that it was really too late to get anything to eat, but it wasn’t. Dave Bellamy said he was delighted to take care of old customers.

Good ol‘ Dave. He supervised the preparation of a pair of extra-dry Boodles gin martinis. Meyer looked beat. He beamed at the drink when it was placed in front of him. And, as on other occasions when the martini is badly needed, he quoted Bernard De Voto on that subject: “The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted. Your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart. The day was not bad, the season has not been bad, and there is sense and even promise in going on. Prosit.”

“Saved a life. Maybe,” I said.

“And almost lost one or two. But didn’t,” he said. “About that picnic tomorrow.”

“Maybe that lithesome person hates picnics.”

“She’s living a picnic out there. I saw a deli next to the supermarket at Baygate Plaza Mall. I can get one of those big wicker hamper things, and a big cooler. I’ll set up a picnic like she never saw before, from shrimp to champagne.”

“What you’re talking about is a Care package.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you start hauling great quantities of food to a female person, it means you really care. It always has. I think it is some primal instinct. The hunter bringing spoils to the cave.”

“Hmmm. Meyer, would it offend your sense of fitness if I called Gretel a girl?”

“Instead of a person or a woman or some such? You want to be patronizing and chauvinistic, eh? Look down upon her?”

“Cut it out, Meyer. I can go with all that approach right up to a point. When it doesn’t mean much one way or another. You know. But here we have one of the truly great, all-time, record-breaking, incomparable girls. And I want to call her a girl.”

“And take her a ton of food. Ah, me. Ah, so. And so it goes. Let’s order before I faint from hunger. You are a child of your times, McGee. And so am I. Call her what you will, but call me a waiter.”

Fourteen

THERE ARE days you can’t ever forget. It doesn’t mean that anything really startling has to happen. It was a great glowing golden day in May. A Sunday numbered twenty-two. There you are in the midst of life, and one of those days comes rolling at you, and it is just like one of the magical days of childhood, like the first Monday after school is out.

We couldn’t warn John Tuckerman and Gretel Howard we were coming. We had to hope they’d be glad to see us when we showed up an hour before noon. And they were. Demonstrably glad. She knew how to accept gifts. None of this “Aw, you shouldn’t have.” She went through the hamper and the cooler, giving little yelps of delight. “Hey! How about this? Wow! Look here, Johnny! Hey, you crazy guys. A jar of red caviar! Have you gone nuts, bonkers, utterly strange?”

I was glad that Meyer had realized it would be best not to bring any booze, or any beer. Tuckerman seemed slightly dazed. He wore a gentle smile. He rocked back and forth, heel to toe. You had to speak to him twice to get an answer.

“I said is the fishing any good?”

“Oh. Sure. I mean, I guess so. Haven’t done much good. But they’re out there, all right. They’re out there.”

He looked much better. It took me a few moments to realize that not only had he shaved; his mustache and hair had been trimmed back a little. He seemed to want to be part of the festivities, but he could not quite keep track of the chatter. We were not trying to dazzle him with repartee or profundities. It was just your normal picnic conversation, but it was as if he were a foreigner among us, looking back and forth with a slightly baffled expression, able to speak the language, only not all that well.

One odd little incident happened. Gretel stopped in the middle of a sentence and stared at John. He sat with his eyes squeezed shut and his jaw knotted. She put her hand on his rigid arm.

“Are you going to be all right?” she asked.

He nodded. And in a little while the tensions went out of him. I asked her about that later, after we had swum down the beach and were walking back, and she said that it was hallucinations. They happened now and again. Some sort of a cousin of delirium tremens, the result of the booze with which he had almost killed himself. She told me that was the reason she did not want to leave him alone. She didn’t want to take him into town yet, or go in without him. Hence her magic washing machine. She thought that I had guessed the problem, and that was why I had brought enough food for fifteen people. By great exercise of character I made myself admit I hadn’t guessed it.

We sat on the side of a dune. We could have been the only two people in the world. I wanted to kiss her. My heart was in my throat. I felt fifteen again. I looked into her eyes and saw her amused acceptance of us, and knew I could. It was immediately intense, astonishing both of us, as was admitted later. We lay back against the slope of the dune, as closely enclasped as we could get, and it was all very delicious for a long time, and then it began to get a little bit too yeasty for the time and place. “Hey!” she said in a muffled voice. “Hey you! McGee!” And then, with a muscular squirm, she kicked us over far enough so that we began rolling, and we rolled over and over down to the bottom of the dune and had to go into the Gulf again to rinse off the sand that had caked on our sweaty bodies.

It was a great day. Eating and swimming and napping, walking and talking. A simple day. I can remember the precise pattern of the white grains of sand on the round tan meat of her shoulder, and the patterns of the droplets of seawater on her long thigh. Gretel filled my eyes. I learned her by heart, wrists and ankles, mouth corners and hairline, the high arches and slender feet, downy hollow of her back, tidy ears, flat to the good skull.

There would never be enough time in all the world for us to say to each other all the things that needed saying, time to tell all that had happened to each of us before the other had appeared-a sudden shining in the midst of life. In so many ways she was like a lady lost long ago, so astonishingly like her-not in appearance as much as in the climate of the heart that it was like being given another chance after the gaming table had already been closed for good. She had a great laugh. It was a husky, full-throated bray, an explosion of laughter, uncontrolled. And she laughed at the right places.

The second strange incident happened in late afternoon when the four of us were up on the roofed deck of the cottage, sitting in the ragged old deck chairs and the unraveling wicker ones, squinting into the sun glare off the broad Gulf.

Meyer had talked a little bit about the odds and ends we had unearthed, Mr. Wedley recovering his red Mazda, the items Kristin had left behind, DeeGee Walloway’s guess as to what had happened. Things like that. I realized that Meyer was sidestepping the big dramatic incident. When he ran down I said, “Leaving it to me?”

“Why not?” he said.

“Leaving what?” Gretel asked.

“Nothing at all. Really.” I became Lawrence of Arabia. “Chap tried to blow some large ugly shotgun holes in us last night. Number twelve. Range of fifteen feet. Missed. Wounded our vehicle.”

“He missed,” Meyer said, “because that slothful-looking beach bum sitting there with the rotten imitation accent has one of the most fantastic reaction times you would ever care to see. I heard a strange little clicking behind us and suddenly McGee slammed into me, and as I was tumbling along the asphalt I heard a deafening pair of explosions.”

She had worn a half smile, anticipating some sort of joke. But when she realized Meyer was quite serious, her jaw dropped and her eyes went wide in consternation. “How terrible!” she said.

“He jumped up and ran over to the fellow and yanked the gun away from him before he could reload and aim again, and the fellow ran right out into the Bay Street traffic and got hit by a car. We saw him get hit. We knew no one could survive that kind of impact, especially a man that heavy. He died on the operating table.”

“Who was it?” Tuckerman asked.

“Nick Noyes.”

Tuckerman boggled at me. “Nick” he said. “Nick. Nick.” It was not a sound of anguish or dismay. It was a puzzled expression he wore, as if he were trying to remember something about Noyes.

“He worked for Hub too, didn’t he?” Gretel said. “In construction or something? Johnny, didn’t the two of you hang around together after Hub left? Isn’t that what you told me?”

I sat between Tuckerman and his sister. Tuckerman reached over and put his right hand on my forearm and clamped down. I would not have believed him that powerful. “Nicky is dead? Really?”

“Very dead, John.”

The grip slowly softened and he took his hand away. His smile came slowly, and grew and grew. It was one of the contagious smiles of childhood; a big candy-apple, cotton-candy, roller-coaster smile.

“I won’t have to kill him!” John Tuckerman said joyously.

Gretel inhaled sharply. “Johnny!”

“Well, I won’t. You heard him, Gretel. Nicky is dead, and I won’t have to even think about killing him any more. That’s the best thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

“Why would you think you had to kill him?”

“Oh, I’ve known I’d have to.”

“But why?”

“Because he was after me.”

“After you? How?”

“Just after me, dammit.”

“But if he was after you, dear, wouldn’t he have come out here?”

“Oh, he’s been here. A lot. Sneaking around. You wouldn’t know about it. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to worry you, that’s all. Now he won’t be around here any more. Unless…” He stopped and stared at me and began to glower.

“What’s the matter, John?”

“You two could be helping him. You could be lying, to make it all easier for him.”

We couldn’t ease his suspicions until Meyer remembered he had the Sunday edition of the Bay Journal down in the car. He got it, and Tuckerman was at last willing to admit Noyes was dead. He went down to ground level and climbed the dune and sat just over the crest of it with his back to us, silhouetted against the sea glare.

“Let me apologize,” Gretel said. “We’ve been through this before. I thought he was over it. So I asked about Nick Noyes, trying to lead John into it in… a less squirrelly fashion. From what I gather, Nick looked John up to commiserate with him, to get drunk together and cuss Hub Lawless and talk about their bad luck. That was while John was still living at the Vista, and before he had smashed up his car. I think Nick suspected that Hub’s disappearance was planned and that my brother was in on it somehow. I think he was trying to pry information out of John. John is quite sure he did not reveal anything. He’s not really sure, of course, but he thinks Nick Noyes was so angry at the whole thing, and so sure Hub had left with Miss Petersen, that if he thought John had any part in it, he would have blown the whistle. It would be actionable, wouldn’t it?”

“Accessory to fraud, or conspiracy to defraud,” Meyer said. “Something ominous at any rate.”

“Also, that Wright Fletcher, the Sheriff’s deputy, was out here prodding away at Johnny. He came several times after I was here, and I finally told him to make an arrest or stay away. He didn’t seem to have anything to go on except the idea that, inasmuch as John was Hub’s best friend, John had to know about anything Hub planned and did.”

“He believes Noyes was out here prowling around?”

“Practically every night. He was very very sure one night. He said he could hear him. We’d had a hard rain earlier in the evening. It dappled the sand and took out footprints and tire tracks. There was just that one hard rain. The next morning I made him walk the perimeter with me. There wasn’t a footprint or a tire track for a hundred yards in any direction. I almost convinced him Nick hadn’t been here. At noontime he told me that it was pretty obvious Nick had a special pair of shoes with soles which imitated the marks rain makes. He was serious. It breaks my heart. He was always so damned sane and practical and fun. At times-I don’t know-I get the feeling he’s putting me on, that it is all some kind of a weird game, and then I will realize he means it, he really means it all.”

“Any idea why he thinks Noyes was after him?”

“No. None. It’s an obsession. Nick was after him, just after him. No reason. Look at him out theref God only knows what sick thoughts are crawling through his, head. He’s better than he was. He let me trim his hair. You noticed? He finally got over the idea that if it was trimmed the hair ends would bleed. Yeck. Every day a little bit better, I keep telling myself.”

Aside from those two incidents, it was one of your great days. We stayed into the night and built a fire of driftwood on the beach. A sea breeze kept the bugs away from us. We had stars by the billion. Meyer was in his best form. He came up with a tale I had never heard before, about a time years ago when he had attended a monetary conference in Tokyo. He was slated to deliver a paper he had written on the effect of interest rates on gross national product in the emerging nations. It was over an hour long. The taxi driver took him that morning to the hotel where he was to deliver his paper. Eager underlings led him to a big hall. He was pleased and surprised at the size of the audience. He gave his talk, shook hands with what seemed to be dozens of Japanese men, and left, still savoring the applause.

That afternoon he was called before the executive committee. They wanted to know why he had failed to appear and deliver his paper. He said he had. They proved he hadn’t. He began to realize that he should have been made suspicious by the fact that the audience was entirely Japanese, quite a few of them were women, and, of the men who shook his hand afterward, not one of them thanked him in English. And he remembered a small elderly Japanese man who stood in the wings while he talked and kept looking at his watch in a troubled way.

Meyer then told us of the lengths he went to to find the hotel again. He never found it. So he would never know whom he had talked to, or what they had expected. He had always remembered how their applause had warmed his heart. A polite people indeed.

He did it well. He had Gretel chuckling and groaning a long time after he finished. When it was late, she made some chicken sandwiches for us to take along, so we could collapse into bed at the Resort.

On the way back along the nine miles of lumps and potholes, I realized how ready I was for sleep. “You and Gretel make an extraordinary couple,” Meyer said, apropos of nothing at all.

“How?”

“Hard to describe, exactly. You give the impression of having been close for years. You are tuned to her in some fashion. The two of you look larger than life somehow. Of course, you are larger than couples one runs across every day. There is some sort of aura about you two. You had it in place when you came back down the beach that first day. I don’t know why it should, but it makes me feel drab.”

“For a drab man, you tell a funny Japanese story.”

“I felt compelled to do my best. She makes you want to dig deeply into your bag of tricks. With no insistence at all, she seems to demand some kind of excellence.”

“I don’t happen to have any of that around.”

“I think she thinks you do, or she wouldn’t bother.”

“How is she bothering?”

“Don’t you know how she looks at you?”

“Okay, okay. Sure.”

He sighed. “That fellow-what was his name? Billy Howard. Billy must have been the prize damn fool of all the world.”

“Maybe he couldn’t stand the pressure of her expectations-the need to be as much better than the next guy as she was better than the next woman.”

“Interesting idea. The retreat from excellence. But she isn’t demanding excellence in that sense, Travis. All she demands is honesty, really.”

“At this point in the life of McGee, how do I go about telling the truths from the lies? When I say something this time, how can I tell that I really mean it?”

“If you can’t tell, we’re all in trouble.”

“How so?”

“In spite of your poses, old friend, you have a strange, tough, anachronistic sense of honor.”

“Oh, sure.”

“You bleed over your despicable acts. But like our friend Rust Hills, you tiptoe past the edge of corruption in a naughty world, and you genuinely suffer if you do not live up to your own images of your various selves.”

“Are you telling me I need not fear meeting the lady’s requirements?”

“Whatever they might be, Travis. Whatever they might be.”

“Look at that hole. You could hide a coffee table in that hole.”

“Be careful. We have no spare, remember.”

I wandered the road, finding the smooth parts, feeling underneath the deepwater tan the heat of the long May day in the sun. I had a stack of those old-fashioned photographic plates in the back of my mind. The big camera had been made of brass and oak. I had spent a lot of the day ducking under the black cloth, raising high the T stick with the magnesium powder in the groove along the top of the bar, focusing the big lens, waiting until she held still, then triggering the powder. Poom. And a cloud of white smoke, and another image of Gretel tucked away forever.

Long ago a picture must have been an event. Capturing a living image has become too ordinary a miracle, perhaps. They go, about with their automatic-drive Nikons and OM-2’s and their Leicaflexes, and put their finger on the button, and the hand-held machinery makes a noise like a big toy cricket. Reep, reep,reep, reep. A billion billion slides, projected once, labeled, and filed forever. Windrows of empty yellow boxes blow across the Gobi, the Peruvian highlands, the temple steps at Chichicastenango. The clicking and whirring and clacking is the background sound at the Acropolis, at the beach at Cannes, on the slopes at Villefranche. All the bright people, stopped in the midst of life, looking with forced smile into the lenses, then to be filed away, their colors fading as the years pass, caught there in slide trays, stack loads, view cubes, until one day the camera person dies and the grandchild says, “Mom, I don’t know any of these people. Or where these were taken even. There are jillions of them here in this big box and more in the closet. What will I do with them anyway?”

“Throw them out, dear.”

Fifteen

I SLEPT like a winter-bound bear and awoke refreshed to a morning of misty rain. Meyer was up and gone. He does not leave long chatty notes. This one said, 8:10. Bkfs dwnstrs. Then Dr. S.

He was gone by the time I got downstairs. The waitress showed me to a table for two in a window corner of the small dining room. It looked out across the wet and empty courts. Between the far trees I could see segments of gray sea, almost flat calm.

I ordered, and as I was drinking coffee, waiting for the food to arrive, I saw Jack the Manager appear in the arched doorway to the lobby. He wore a black sport shirt and white slacks. The shirt was stained across the round front of him. He stared at me. He looked like an emperor penguin disapproving of a dead fish.

He came directly over to my table and said, “Mr. McGee!”

“Good morning. Join me?”

“I would like to point out-”

“Sit down and point out. Please.”

He eased into the chair facing me. He looked nervous and uncomfortable. “There have been complaints,” he said.

“About what?”

“Your group was very noisy Friday night. And there have been two altercations in the parking area.”

I nodded. “Of course. Shots were fired. Then all those tires screaming, and then the sirens. Very upsetting.”

He looked slightly relieved. “I’m glad you’re taking this attitude. It makes it easier for me. Our guests are used to a-”

“Just one moment,” I said, stopping him. I took out the pocket notebook which Meyer had convinced me was useful. I leafed through the pages, nodding to myself, frowning. When he started to speak, I stopped him with upraised hand.

I put the notebook away and smiled reassuringly at him. “I know what is basically bothering you. Right? And I am really not authorized to tell you anything at all. But you’ve been so pleasant, such a good host, that I am going to level with you, and I hope you appreciate what a rare thing that is.”

“I don’t know what-”

“From what I guess, and from what I know of procedure, there is really very little chance of your being subpoenaed.”

“Of being… for what… I don’t…”

“And there is even less chance of the Resort here being either fined heavily or closed under the provisions of Chapter Twenty-one, Paragraph C-Six, subparagraph a.”

“But I don’t-”

“So you don’t have to worry. Right? You can relax! It isn’t hanging over you any longer. At least, I am reasonably sure they won’t come at you in that manner. But nobody knows, of course, until they have an executive session.”

His face had turned red. He grasped the edge of the table and leaned toward me. “Mr. McGee, I haven’t the faintest idea what the hell you are talking about!”

My food came. It looked very good indeed. I smiled at Jack the Manager, and I winked at him and said, “None of that now.”

“NONE OF WHAT?”

“Shshsh. Please. You know I can’t go any further with this. I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. I was only trying to do you a favor.”

“But I want to know what this is all about!”

“Please forget I said anything to you. I violated a confidence. And for God’s sake, don’t say anything to anyone else, because if it was leaked out and got back to the Supervisor, there’s no way in the world you could avoid a subpoena.”

“I must insist-”

“Do you want to ruin everything for yourself? Have you got some kind of economic death wish?” I chomped the good Canadian bacon. I beamed and winked and nodded at him. His choice was clear. Either I was certifiable as a maniac, or he and the Resort were in violation of the rules, somehow. In serious violation. I could guess his thoughts from his expression. It has all become regulation by blackmail, of course. Every small businessman lives with the knowledge that he is always in violation of some of the rules. Safety regulations, consumer protection laws, wage and hour laws, pure food and drug statutes, IRS regulations-and on top of all these are the interwoven, supplementary, conflicting regulations of the state, county, and city.

He fills out the forms and sends them in because he knows that, if the forms do not come back in, the computer flags him. He fills the blanks with lies because it would take more hours than there are in the week to fill in the forms arriving each week. He knows all these lies go on record somewhere, and that at any time a field inspector can happen along and check out the old lies and apply pressure. So all he can do is contribute to both political parties, support local, state, and national candidates, and hope for the best.

It was easier for him to believe he was in some kind of trouble than that I had lost my wits.

He got up and said, “Uh… thank you, Mr. McGee.”

“Believe me, I was glad to do it.”

“Uh… enjoy your breakfast,” he said, and walked away. He turned in the archway, stopped, and stared back at me, his expression troubled, eyes clouded. He shrugged and walked on, out of sight.

It was a small and childish pleasure. I ate with appetite. Great eggs. Days of misty rain are fine. Jack the Manager would leave us alone. He would do a lot of wondering, but he would keep his mouth shut and stay out of the way. And we would refrain from chasing anyone out into traffic. And we would duck away from all shotgun blasts to avoid messing up the parking area.

Gretel was alive in this rain-mist day, in the same dimension, time sector, and hemisphere. She fitted in with any recitation of one of my lists of good words: pound sweet apples, song by Eydie, pine forests, spring water, old wool shirts, night silence, fresh Golden Bantam, first run of a hooked permit, Canadian geese, coral reefs, good leather, thunderstorms, wooden beams, beach walking, Gretel. We all have the lists. Different lists for different times of day and of life. Our little barometers of excellence, recording inner climate.

The first chore after breakfast was another call to the hospital to get the word on the old party we had restored to momentary life. They said that Whittaker Davis was in serious condition, but no longer in critical condition. I asked if his condition could be considered grave. She said they didn’t use that word any more because people got it confused with being buried. She said if they did use it, Mr. Davis would be a little bit better than grave, that it sort of would come between critical and serious, but don’t count on it.

Meyer points out that fewer and fewer people in this country speak English any more, and that the trend is toward the guttural grunt. As a case in point, he quotes the earnest newscaster he heard one time over WTVT Channel 2 in Utica, New York speaking of an emergency operation performed upon the wife of one of the nation’s most important citizens. With expression of concern he read from his script that she was being operated on because they had “found a noodle on her breast.” The song lyrics, Meyer says, presage the future shape of the language.

I was glad the old party was hanging in there. At least we had provided time for the Davis clan to gather at the bedside, if there was a clan, and if the hospital permitted clans to gather.

While at the phone I found the number for Ralph Stennenmacher, General Agent, in the Coast National building. The girl said he was in, and tried to get my name and make an appointment, but I said I would wander on up and take my chances.

A neat little sign on the corner of her secretarial desk said, “Dora Danniker, Serf-Person.” She was as tiny as B.J. Bailey, but had a lean pale little face, big glasses, and mouse-blond hair pulled back into a knot. You half expected a toothy actor to pull her to her feet, take away her glasses, fluff her hair out, and say, “But you are beautiful, Dora darling!” Then they would dance.

She looked me over with considerable speculative care, from my tan Eagle shirt to my green brushed-denim slacks and buff-colored After Hours shoes, and back up again.

She said, “It would be nice if you could at least say you’d seen me someplace before, McGee.”

I thumped my forehead with the heel of my hand. “Friday night?”

She nodded and smiled an evil smile. “You called me your little pal for a while. You said I should fly away with you, and we would sail the seven seas, climb the highest mountains. And all that stuff.”

“Have mercy.”

“Even smashed as you were, friend, plotzed out of your wits, you were using your head. You were trying to sign me on to solve the big problem you were having with B.J. and Mishy. You weren’t exactly what I would call some kind of a prize. I think it was because those two hate each other and needed an excuse. Do you get like that often?”

“Every night in the week, love.”

She studied me, nodded to herself. “You couldn’t look the way you look and do that. You were pretty funny for a long time. Life of the party. And finally, of course, you passed out.”

“You were still there?”

“Because the guy I was with was still there and I was exhausted from trying to drag him away. You want to see my boss?”

“When convenient.”

“He’s got somebody in there with him now. Have a seat. Have a paper. I’ve got to get something done here or I’d spend a little more time working you over. How was your hangover?”

“Didn’t your boyfriend object to this ‘sail the seas and climb the mountains’ routine?”

“Sure. But you finally got tired of him yapping at you. We were walking, the whole bunch of us. You threw Timmy up into a tree.”

“I what?”

“You picked him up and threw him up into a tree. You threw him pretty high. He’s sort of a small guy. He grabbed a branch and you kept right on walking and talking. He really hates you.”

“Please tell him I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry. He hates everybody your size. It’s just a general attitude-”

The office door opened and a man came out, speaking back over his shoulder, saying, “If they get any line on him, Ralph, like I said, I’ll go on back down. But this ought to be enough for our purposes.”

He smiled and nodded at Dora Danniker, gave me one quick flat glance, and went on out, a lean man in a wrinkled pale blue suit, carrying a gray tweed dispatch case. After he was gone I tried to fasten his face firmly in my memory, but it faded before I could begin to identify any distinctive feature. Ralph Stennenmacher stood in his office doorway and looked at me with a genuine smile of welcome.

Dora said, “This is Mr. Travis McGee. He hasn’t had a chance to tell me what he wants to see you about.”

He shook my hand and tugged me toward his office. He liked me. That is the secret. That’s what had made Ralph a success. He was interested in me and he wanted to know more about me. He wanted to sit me down across his big blond desk and listen to my life story. When that genuine and unmistakable warmth is combined with good sense and good products, then you have a great salesman, and a happy man. One wall was hung with certificates, awards, commendations, and group photographs, hung frame to frame. He had white hair, big black-framed glasses, and a comfortable belly. He had little broken veins in his nose and cheeks, big knuckles, a resonant voice, and laugh lines around his eyes. He aimed a big finger at me and said, “Hey, I saw you and another man at the Cove having lunch with Walter Olivera. Excuse me, damn-At, at the Galley. Mmmm. Friday?”

I said that was right. This Timber Bay had begun to give the impression of being a risky place for intrigue. Everybody seemed to keep an eye on everybody. I gave him the Devlin Boggs explanation of our presence in town, and he was glad to tell all.

“I wrote the coverage on all Hub’s activities and on his personal life too. In the beginning we were thinking of having business insurance, of having insurance at his death go right into the company or corporation so that it could be used to buy out the widow’s interest in the partnership or her stock interest, whatever. But I wasn’t satisfied that it answered his problem, on account of the way he ran things. Understand, Hub was a good businessman, but he was a loner and a high roller. He wanted to run whatever show he was in, and he had an instinct about pushing his luck-right up until the end, of course. So it began to appear to me like there wouldn’t be much of anything left of HubLaw, Double L, Lawless Groves, or Hula Construction if Hub died. For one thing, nobody would know what was going on. He kept terrible records and he kept a lot of information in his head. And second, because of the way he liked to keep moving money and debt around, it might be that the businesses, each one of them, might have to be liquidated to pay off what was owed. So we started quite a while back with three hundred thousand ordinary life, with Julia the beneficiary, and built it to a half million, million, million and a half, two million, two million two hundred thousand as of the alleged date of death. The girls were contingent beneficiaries. We set the policies up with Julia as the owner, and We put them in her trust downstairs at the bank, the one her daddy Jake Herron set up for her when she turned eighteen. Her daddy helped me get started, by the way. A finer man never lived…

“Where was I? Oh, the trust paid the premiums on the policies, and it left Julia in a pretty good condition. You could just about figure that after expenses and all, and knocking off the mortgage, she’d have anyway one point seven million, plus the little she gets from Jake’s estate, which goes to the daughters, share alike, when Julie dies. That money could bring her in about ninety thousand a year tax free, more than enough right now to be mighty comfortable on in Timber Bay, but who can say if it will be enough tomorrow? Tomorrow it might cost ninety thousand a year to hire a truck driver. But it’s all, like they say, academic. Hub Lawless is alive down there in Mexico somewhere, according to the report that freelance investigator that just left here gave me.”

“I heard that a Mr. Frederic Tannoy was going down there with Deputy Fletcher to see if they could-”

“Gone and got back late last night. Tannoy was the one in the blue suit leaving as you came in. He gave me a copy of this thing he wrote up, which he now turns in to Planters Mutual General Insurance in Topeka. A good solid old-line company. Conservative investments, and they treat their policyholders right. I’ve worked with them a number of years, and this is the first sour one we’ve ever had. I’d give an arm if this hadn’t have happened. Things like this hurt everybody. This says confidential, so I better not let you have it to look at, but I can read you off here what it says.”

He frowned at the document, lips moving, and said, “What happened was that Tannoy and Wright Fletcher went down to Guadalajara with pictures of Hub, and they’ve got here a little list of five people swearing they saw Hub Lawless in Guadalajara after the twenty-second of March, the date Hub was supposed to have fallen off the boat. It also says here that they picked up Xerox copies of the office records from the Naderman-Santos Medical Clinic, where they had a set of presurgery pictures taken for the record and placed on file under the name Pickering. He made a firm date for Wednesday, March thirtieth, to sign himself in. He paid five hundred dollars down when he made the date in late February. He signed up for-these are hard words-rhinoplasty, rhytidectomy, and, uh, blepharoplasty. Nose job, face lift, and work on the eyes. He had used the name Steven Pickering, and he had a tourist card in that name and had signed as Pickering on the formal release for surgery. He didn’t show up for his appointment. It doesn’t matter, as far as the investigation is concerned. There’s enough in this report so they can back off from paying the face amount of the policies. They can assume he went somewhere else to get the work done. It would be foolish to sue them. No chance of a recovery, or even any compromise. He’s down there somewhere with that Petersen woman. I just wonder how he feels about what he’s done to everybody around here.”

“Maybe he doesn’t care.”

“Oh, no. Hub cares. That’s how come people can’t understand it, really. He’s a good man. Everything just got to be too much for him. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I think that if everything had worked out just fine for him in a business way-the new shopping plaza and that huge development nine miles south of the city-he would still have done something nobody would be able to understand. Maybe blown his own head off.”

It surprised me. “Why?”

“Things aren’t all that great. You play craps?”

“Once in a while. I’m no big fan.”

“Imagine a man like Hub Lawless at a great big crap table. He’s keeping a dozen bets going all the time. He’s on the come line and the field. He’s betting with fours and tens, against sixes and eights. He’s bending over that table, sweating, changing bets, doubling up, drawing down, watching the dice and the stick man and the other players. He keeps winning because he is working harder than anybody else, and he’s figuring the odds closer, and he’s keeping track every minute. For a long time it’s fun. And one day he finds out that they’ve chained him to the table. That’s it, his whole life, piling up counters. He can still keep going as hard as before, but it’s different. Choice is gone.”

It was a striking analogy. “He used to get away a lot.”

“No. Not a lot, and not for long. Everybody thought he was such a happy guy, such good spirits, so friendly. I knew him real well, Mr. McGee, and in the last few years he seemed to me to be kind of… wistful. He was getting heavy and out of condition, and he smoked too much. He didn’t have time to stay in shape. He didn’t have time for much social life or home life, either. Nice home. Lovely wife and daughters. But he had chained himself to the table without realizing it. He knew, or had started to realize, that the rest of his life was going to be pretty much the same.”

“One of those evaluations that come along at forty?”

“I suppose so. But he felt the weight of the people who depended on him for jobs. I guess he even felt my weight. I wrote all his coverage, and I don’t mind saying I’ll miss the business. I guess a man gets to feel the need to experience more lives than the one they give him a chance to lead, no matter how well he does at it.”

“And along comes the lady architect.”

“Sure thing. Ever shoot a sandhill crane?”

“No.

“I got talked into going over to Texas one time with some old buddies of mine and shooting crane. They put me in the tall grass downwind from this little sort of marshy pond. And after a time this big gawky old bird starts to soar in for a landing. They yelled to me to shoot it. So I stood up and shot it. It was about as tough a shot as standing on the end of a runway and shooting a seven-forty-seven. Blew most of his feathers off, and he landed thump dead about eight feet from me. Made me sick to my stomach. People will do some funny things in the name of sport. That’s the way Kristin Petersen shot old Hub down. She blew all the feathers off him and he landed thump. He was ready for her. He was ready for anything that was going to change things around for him. Nothing tasted good to him any more. He stopped giving a damn what anybody thought of him. When the dice came to him, he wanted to show off for Kristin, so he bet the whole pile and lost it, and there was nothing left for him to do, if he wanted to keep her, but steal and run. And that is just what he did.”

“He didn’t do it very well.”

“If he’d done it well, he’d have left Julia with her pride and with plenty of money. That was how he justified it, I guess.”

“I certainly appreciate your being so open with me, Mr. Stenneninacher.”

“Nobody in Timber Bay calls me that. It is too damned long a name. I’m Ralph to everybody. You come back any time you want to talk about Hub Lawless. I knew him about as well as anybody except John Tuckerman. Poor John.”

“He’s off the sauce. His sister has it under control.”

“I heard she was taking care of him down there. I remember her when she was in high school here. Gretel was a beautiful girl.”

“Still is.”

“I get to know all the high-school kids. I do my magic shows.”

“Magic?”

He smiled and pulled a long yellow pencil out of his ear, snapped it in half, threw the pieces up in the air, and caught the pencil as it came down whole. “When you think of magic, think of Ralph the magician. And think of insurance because it will be magic if you can get by without it.”

“Oh.”

“I get them in junior high, before they get too sophisticated. Levitation. Magic rings. Mystery fire. The multiplying rabbits. I practice one hour every morning of my life. I get up that extra hour to get the practice in.” He stopped smiling as he thought of Tuckerman again. “John went downhill very very fast after Hub left. He drank himself into the hospital that first month, and that’s where what little money he had left went to. I hope he works himself out of it. But I certainly don’t know what will happen to him. He lived off Hub’s energy and luck all his life. I can’t think of anyone around here who’d hire him. There was something besides booze involved. Dr. Sam Stuart knows more about that than I would.”

“Drugs?”

“Something like that. Something that bent his head out of shape.”

I thanked him again, and I waved good-by to Dora, the Serf-Person, as I left. I hesitated when I got off the elevator, then decided it was as good a time as any to see Devlin Boggs about Kristin Petersen’s banking affairs.

I waited near his office. He was somewhere in the back of the bank. Soon I saw him striding across the carpeting, erect as a doorman, neat as an undertaker, lugubrious as a liberal in Scottsdale. I told him what I wanted to find out, expecting that he would turn the chore over to an underling, some pathetic little vice-president, but he wanted to handle it himself.

I sat and listened to him call the Atlanta Southern Bank and Trust and say those mystic words which enabled him to pierce the secretarial barricades and get through to a certain Mr. Chance McKay. I thought that a dashing name for a banker-maybe not for an Atlanta banker. Finally Boggs made it through to him, and it is to be noted that the southern businessman and banker tends to relate to the telephone the way a four-wheeler relates to CB nineteen. Regardless of regional origin, he becomes just a bit mushmouth.

“Hey Chance? This here’s Dev Boggs down at Timber Bay, Florida… Sure… Just fine, mostly… No, I couldn’t make it this year. Surely missed it, too… Old buddy, I need a small favor from you, won’t cost you a dime. We’re looking at a big loss down here on business and personal loans to a skip. Maybe it wouldn’t look big to you, but it is king-size for Timber Bay, and it might could eat a hole in our loan-loss reserve that’ll take a time to fill back. This skip took off, we think, with a girlfriend who’s one of your customers up there, and if we. could get a clue on where checks are maybe coming in from on her account, or where the closeout balance was sent, it might help us find the skip. The name is Petersen, first name Kristin with a K. Account number four-four-eight, four-fourone… Sure, take your time… What?… Oh, okay.”

Boggs kept the phone at his ear and covered the mouthpiece and said, “He thinks he had an earlier request on that. An official one.”

“It would be likely.”

“Right here, Chance… Yes, go ahead.” Boggs listened and wrote down numbers. “Yes… I see… Sure. Listen, I want to thank you. ‘Preciate it… What?… I do hope to make it this year for sure. Our best to Molly, hear? ’Bye.”

He read to me from the scratch paper. “Her checking account balance is twenty-one hundred and twenty dollars and five cents. The last check was dated March twentieth, a check made out to cash for five hundred, and there has been no activity in the account since. She has passbook savings of about eleven hundred dollars. She has a one year Certificate of Deposit at six and a quarter, percent in the amount of seven thousand dollars, due in July, and two four-year CDs for fifteen thousand each, due year after next. She also has a safe deposit box.”

“A prudent lady. A tad over… what? Forty thousand? One assumes she’s planning to return.”

With mournful look he said, “If she’s prudent, she wouldn’t want to lump her money in with what Lawless absconded with. If anything went wrong she could lose hers too. I imagine she’s woman of the world enough to know that the affair can cool off at any time. She left herself a place to go back to.”

Sixteen

WHEN I couldn’t find Meyer, I decided it was a good time to locate Eleanor Ann Harder. I had the address and phone number van had given me. She answered the phone and said she had just gotten off duty, but if I came right over, we could talk.

It was a small frame cottage on a small lot, with so many trees and bushes it was almost hidden from the street. She was a big woman, thick and solid rather than fat. She had a pale, rectangular face, small features, erect carriage. She could have been thirty or fifty. She wore her white uniform. We sat on the little screened porch at the side of the house and talked.

“We’re so grateful to you, Mr. McGee, for anything you can do. Take Van’s occupation away from him and he’s lost. He’s a very proud man. He’s a very decent man.”

“We should be able to work it all out. The Sheriff is cooperative. The whole situation looks different today, not like it looked two months ago.”

“He phoned me yesterday afternoon from Sarasota and said things were going well, and wanted to know if I’d seen you. I said not yet but that you would probably stop by. I told him about Nick Noyes and how the paper said he had fired shots at you and your friend before he was killed accidentally. Van was very upset about that. He couldn’t understand why Nick would do such a thing. He hadn’t thought there would be any danger involved in your coming over, or he would have warned you.”

“He’s making pretty fair time.”

“He’ll be here Thursday, he thinks. Should I tell the marina?”

“They’re all set. No need. I would imagine you are certain Van didn’t get drunk that night.”

Her chin came up and her eyes got smaller. “Mr. McGee, I met my husband almost five years ago. I worked at Tampa General at that time. His shrimp boat was run down by an ore ship, and he spent four days out in the Gulf before they were rescued. He came down with pneumonia, and he was on my station. He is a fine man. We were married two weeks after he got out of the hospital. As an RN I know the symptoms of the abuse of alcohol. I knew of the ceremony of taking one drink aboard the Julie at the beginning of each cruise. It was his… I don’t know how to say it.”

“I know what you mean. Proving to himself each time he had whipped it.”

“And he had. I know he was given something very strong to knock, him out like that. He was fuzzy minded for days. His memory was quite disorganized.”

“But he didn’t go to a doctor.”

“I begged him to. A doctor might have detected something in specimens. Van is one of the world’s most stubborn men. By the time he went to Dr. Stuart, it was too late for anything like that. He had three strikes on him around Timber Bay anyway. You see, he came from here.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s hard to find out very much about Van from Van. As a young man he was a notorious drunk. He broke places up and was thrown in jail dozens of times. You knew him in Lauderdale after he’d sobered up and become a respectable citizen. A reputation hangs on. For example, when he lost his shrimp boat, there was talk around Timber Bay that he’d been at the helm, drunk, when it happened. When Hub hired him at Hula Marine, people said Hub would live to regret it. Hub Lawless enjoyed hiring… misfits. I think he enjoyed gratitude.”

“Then it was pretty damned cruel to feed Van a mickey.”

“It was wicked in the way that word is used in the Bible.”

“It was part of the plot he dreamed up.”

“So he could escape punishment as a thief and adulterer. His soul will scream in hell forever.” She meant it. She was not the mild lady I had thought. Her knuckles were white and a muscle under her eye twitched and leaped.

“Mrs. Harder, I wanted to make something clear to you. Van thinks that I am undertaking this venture for money. I’m not. I’ll take expenses, if he insists. But no ten thousand. I pretended to go along with that because if I said I would do it as a favor, he wouldn’t have wanted me to come over here at all.”

“I know. He’s planning to pay it. It might take three years, but he’ll pay it. You can’t stop him. If you do what you promised to try to do, then nothing on earth can stop him from paying you the rnoney, as long as he is alive and working.”

“Is there some way I could sneak it back to you?”

“I would never betray him like that. He’d walk right out of my life if he ever found out. I wouldn’t blame him. I couldn’t stand losing him.”

When I told Meyer about her, when we met at the bar at the Galley, he said that when he had been little an elderly aunt had given him an image of the devil which had lasted all his life. “The traditional figure, of course. Lean, very white face, all in black, black goatee, cloven feet, bat wings, a tail with a strange pointy end like an arrowhead. And a pitchfork with little barbs on the tines. Whenever a wicked person dies, there is a final exhalation. The soul emerges on that final breath, looking a bit like a small graveyard spook, a little evanescent thing in a white sheet with black eyeholes. The soul tries to rise up to heaven, but the devil is right there, making his rounds of the dying wicked ones, and he spears it with his fork and stuffs it into a specimen bag he wears on his belt. When the bag is jammed full he turns it over to a messenger-type demon. That demon gives him an empty bag and takes the full one on down to hell. He goes down the nearest well, or mine shaft, or newly dug grave, and keeps right on going. He dumps the bag out and picks up an empty one. The resident in-house demons set upon the bagged souls and start all that frying, basting, slicing, and so on we hear about.”

The bartender forced a laugh. Meyer stared at him. “You don’t believe in hell?”

“Well, not that one, thank God.” He wandered away, touching his throat.

“So what about Dr. Sam Stuart?”

“I’ll tell you at the table, Travis.”

As we finished our drink, awaiting the table call; I told him about Kristin’s idle forty thousand. And I told him about how Tannoy and Deputy Fletcher had nailed down Hub’s presence in Guadalajara subsequent to the supposed drowning.

At the table he told me about Dr. Stuart. “He’s younger than I expected him to be. Sort of a jumpy, impatient, high-strung type. He has a crusade going. But he thinks it’s lost before he can even get it off the ground. But he is going to try. He seems to be that sort of a person. What do you know about PCP?”

“Is that the name of his crusade?”

“It’s an animal tranquilizer. Phencyclidine. It was developed for use in hypodermic guns to knock down grizzly bears in national parks and keep them down while they were transported to less accessible areas.”

“If it’s also called angel dust, I’ve heard of it. It makes a very rough trip, I’ve heard.”

Meyer looked in his notebook. “It is known by different names in different areas. Hog, crystal, peace pill, blasting powder, and sugarino. Range of symptoms: it can produce a staggering walk, slurred speech, and slowed reaction times, imitating the effects of alcohol. It can produce bizarre sensations and hallucinations. People act out violent fantasies. It upsets the neural linkages in the brain. With repeated use it can cause permanent brain damage, with the lingering effects of paranoia, suspicion, anxiety, tendencies toward inexplicable violence, distorted memory, sporadic amnesia. It can duplicate acute schizophrenia.”

“Nicky Noyes?”

“He’s pretty sure of it. He thinks that it is the root cause of a lot more death and violence than people realize. One-car accidents, suicides, mass murders, sniping, stranglings. The effects are almost completely unpredictable, varying with each individual. He says the whole situation terrifies him.”

“Isn’t that just a little bit strong?”

“You should hear him, Travis. He made a believer out of me. He’s had a couple of fifteen-year-old kids blind themselves with their fingernails.”

I stared at him. “That made my stomach turn right over. They better stop that stuff at the source.”

“That’s the problem. Any college chemistry student with four or five hundred dollars can set up production in a shed and be turning out phencyclidine in a few days out of easily available materials. They turn the liquid into a crystalline substance. A marijuana cigarette doctored with a pinch of angel dust goes on the street for ten dollars, and five or six little teenagers can turn on on one cigarette, and the chemists who set up the lab can make five figures a week wholesaling the stuff. He says there is an underground lab somewhere in the Timber Bay area. He says he thinks Noyes was one of the several local dealers.”

“Oh, great.”

“Dr. Stuart says Noyes wasn’t too stable to begin with. He’d been in various kinds of trouble before Lawless ever hired him. Lawless straightened him out.”

“I wonder if Nicky gave Tuckerman some of his free samples.”

“I wondered about that too, and I asked Dr. Stuart if that could be possible. He thought it over and said that it would be impossible to separate the effects of angel dust and the effects of acute alcoholism. He said Tuckerman had been a heavy drinker for years, thinking of himself as a social drinker but getting ever nearer the edge, and in the process doing quite a bit of physical damage to himself. He said that after Lawless left, Tuckerman drank himself into a series of alcoholic spasms in April that destroyed a lot of brain tissue-maybe as much as a dozen series of electroshock treatments. Tuckerman has fatty degeneration of the heart, twenty percent liver function, coronary artery disease, and borderline diabetes.”

“Does Gretel know all that?”

“He did mention that he had talked to her about John’s condition, so I guess she was given all the bad news. He said he told her that John was erratic but probably not dangerous.”

“She’ll have to stay with him, then.”

“There isn’t anyone else,” Meyer agreed.

And I knew that Gretel was not the sort of person to sidestep any obligation of the blood or the heart. Tuckerman would probably hang on for years. Nice timing, McGee. Your usual luck.

After lunch we went back to the suite at the Resort. I felt restless. I talked it all over again with Meyer. We had been up one side of it and down the other. We had done a lot more prying than our limited function warranted. We knew more about Timber Bay than we had wanted to know. Good ol‘ Hub Lawless was down there in Yucatan trying to turn his his personal clock back to the steamy days of his young manhood.

I wandered around the sitting room, wishing I was on Gretel’s beach with Gretel. I stopped at the windows and looked out, and saw a small familiar figure coming around the edge of the tennis courts, beyond the backstops, heading for the pool. By leaning close to the window, I saw her take up position on a chaise on the apron of the pool.

So I went down there and came up on her quietly, and sat cross-legged on the tile beside her chaise without invitation. Billy Jean wore giant sunglasses with rose-purple lenses, a yellow turban, yellow bikini, and a quart of coconut oil.

“I’m still supposed to stay the hell away?”

She shrugged. “Stay. Go. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“I was wondering if Nicky was on angel dust.”

“You mean often, or just the other night?”

“Both.”

“Okay, yes to both. He hit it pretty good, but like he said, it’s okay for some people and it isn’t okay for other people. I guess it wasn’t so great for him either, shooting off a gun like that in the parking lot.”

“B.J., he was trying to kill me.”

“You say.”

“Please believe me. He really tried, and if he hadn’t been so unsteady, he would have done it.”

She got up and pulled the back of the chaise out of the stops so she could lay it flat. She got back onto her towel face down.

“Okay,” she said wearily. “So he really tried. And if he hadn’t missed, I could have gone to your funeral. Just think.”

“But it was an extreme reaction. It was crazy.”

“Nicky was a crazy kind of person. Nobody ever really knew what he’d do next. He did whatever he felt like. You always knew things would be lively around Nicky. So the crystal rotted his head out. Okay, he’s dead, isn’t he? Why are you worrying about him? I thought the only person you ever worried about was Travis McGee.”

“Did you try crystal?”

“Ha! Once, baby. Just once. That is a hit like you can’t believe. Christ! There I am crawling around on my floor, and it keeps bending under me, and I’m scared shitless I’ll fall through. I sit in a corner where I think it’s safe and I look at my hands and my fingers had all grown together so my hands were like-you know-flippers. Like pink mittens. I saw a kid like that on television. His mother had taken the wrong kind of medicine when she was pregnant. I had these pink flippers instead of fingers and I started screaming and screaming and screaming. But they said afterward all I did was make a little mewly sound and I kept staring at my hands with the tears running down my face. No way I would ever try that crystal again. Nicky said I might get a real good ride out of it the next time, but it wasn’t worth trying. I still dream about my hands looking like that. I’m at the piano and somebody asks for something that’s tough to play, and I look down and there are those goddamn flippers again. No way. I stay with a little grass now and then, and not much of that either. And some hash when I’m on vacation.”

She turned her head and looked at her hand and spread the fingers, worked them, closed the hand into a fist and put it under her cheek.

“B.J., I’m sorry I screwed up our friendship.”

“I could certainly have done without you showing up with that pig Mishy, especially after the nice note you gave me when you left the lounge earlier.”

“I apologize.”

She rolled onto her side and plucked the purple glasses off and squinted intently at me.

“If you want to pick it up where we left off, forget it. You hurt me. You really hurt me, and the kind of person I am, I can’t ever… you know… recapture a mood, not after I’ve been hurt. I thought you were a truly great person. It just goes to show.”

I nodded. “You’re right. It goes to show. I will cherish the memory of the little time we had.”

“You will? Honest?”

“Yes, I will.”

She grinned and put her glasses back on. “Okay. So will I. And that’s the best way. A wonderful memory. Right?”

“One of the best.”

“Maybe you’re okay, McGee. Maybe you’ve got some heart after all. Listen, I’m sorry I got Nicky all worked up about you. I had no way of knowing he would do anything like he did. I mean, who could ever guess?”

I went back up to the suite. Meyer read me perfectly, and was amused I should take the trouble to placate Miss Bailey. I don’t know why it should amuse him to have me try to get back in the good graces of people I have offended. It is just the sort of thing he does. But I offend more than he does. Oftener and more thoroughly.

I went into my bedroom and got the four-by-five color print of Lawless out of the nightstand drawer where I had put it. I straightened it out. It had cracked a little bit where I had folded it before. I took it to the bright light at the window and studied it.

Okay, so it was taken April eighth in Guadalajara, according to the accompanying message. And that would date it just seventeen days after a heart attack. He looked substantial, hearty, and cheerful, sitting there pouring his beer. So maybe it wasn’t a heart attack. Maybe some kind of violent attack of flu. Or maybe he mended very quickly.

And Sheriff Hack Ames had received the slide in the mail just about one month later.

Probably, if it was a heart attack he would not be anxious to undergo a lot of complicated surgery, and that was why he had never showed up at the Naderman-Santos Medical Clinic. So why hadn’t he gotten his five hundred back or at least rescheduled his appointment? Lawless could not have felt he had left a trail leading directly to Guadalajara. John Tuckerman knew where he was going, but John was loyal. But how loyal does a man remain when you take off and leave him penniless?

Some woman in Orlando had been projecting her Mexican slides and had recognized Lawless as being the man pictured in most of the newspapers in Florida, and featured on TV newscasts. And now Tannoy and Fletcher had nailed it down. Lawless had, been seen in Guadalajara subsequent to the twenty-second of March.

The photograph wasn’t telling me a thing. I looked at his clothing. The short-sleeved khaki jacket was bleached by sun and age to an off-white. I wondered what other clothing he had taken with him. Whatever he had decided to take, he had probably left packed in a suitcase in the jeep, down there under the cottage on stilts. It might be of some vague help to know what was missing from his wardrobe. It might be a clue to where he intended to hole up with the architect. Beach stuff would give one answer, and a lot of sweaters missing would give another.

I interrupted Meyer’s somber inspection of the Monday Barron’s. “I think maybe I’ll go check something out with Julia Lawless.”

“Do you owe her an apology too?”

“No. I thought it might make a difference to know what clothes he took with him.”

“If you’re that restless, Travis, why don’t you drive down and see Gretel? I’m sure she’d be happy to see you.”

“Am I being busy for the sake of being busy? Is that what you think?”

“All I know is you’re making me nervous. Go somewhere. Please.”

“Where will you be?”

“Right here. Asleep, if everything works out.”

Seventeen

WHEN I arrived at 215 South Oak Lane, I saw that the garage-sale sign was still planted in the lawn. The sallow housewife with the dark blond hair and bitter smile sat in a folding chair in the shade just inside the overhead doors of the big garage: A very pretty young girl was standing at a table nearby, polishing a brass candlestick.

“Hey McGee,” the woman said. “We met the other day. I’m Freddy Ellis. Did you meet Tracy Lawless?” The girl gave me a quick glance. “Hi,” she said and turned her attention back to her chore.

“Looks as if you did well,” I said.

“Damn well, considering. The gang of locusts came and went over the weekend. Several times. We’re down to the dregs.”

“Is Mrs. Lawless around?”

“She’ll be back after a while,” Tracy said. “What is it you want?”

“She told me I could stop back if I wanted to ask her anything else.”

“About what?”

“Tracy!” Freddy Ellis said warningly.

“I’m sorry, but there’ve been enough people bothering her. This has been very hard for her. This sale and all. She’s exhausted.”

“When she gets back, if she doesn’t want to talk to me, I won’t push it.”

She studied me and then nodded. She polished the last of the white residue from the candlestick and placed the pair on display. I looked around and noticed that all the guns and fishing tackle were gone. Most of the photographic equipment seemed to be gone. His ten-speed bike, rowing machine, and bowling ball were still there.

Tracy said, at my elbow, “I found out that they drill holes in a bowling ball to fit whoever buys it. I don’t think my mother knew that either. I guess it won’t sell. I don’t know why the bicycle won’t sell. It cost nearly six hundred dollars, and we’ve got it priced at two hundred, and it is practically new. He was going to get in really good shape. He was going to ride with me and Lynn every morning, and then he was going to ride it to work. I think we did that three times. Maybe even four.” She did not sound especially bitter. Just factual.

A tall surfboard was propped against the wall. When I looked more closely at it, she said, “I’m holding that for a girl that has to ask her father if she can buy it It used to be mine.”

“It’s a good one.”

“I know. But it is dumb to have a surfboard here. When is there any surf to ride? Just in storms, sometimes. I didn’t even ask for one. He just bought it as a surprise year before last. He threw away a lot of money that way.”

“It’s fun to buy things for people you love.”

“That’s one of the reasons, I guess,” she said, and turned away. The bitterness had been visible for a moment.

Julia drove in and got out of her car, carrying a bag of groceries. The daughter went to her and took it and apparently asked her if she wanted to talk to me. She nodded and smiled at me, and the girl went into the house with the bag.

We talked once again in the living room, with the coffee table between us. Yes, she had heard that the investigators had established that Hub was in Mexico subsequent to the twenty-second of March. She said that was nonsense. He was dead, and she knew it.

“Did Hack Ames show you a picture of Hub taken in Guadalajara on April eighth?”

“He tried to show it to me. I said it was impossible. It just couldn’t be. I wouldn’t even look at it. I said it was some kind of a trick. He got very annoyed with me. He really did.”

“I’ve got a print of that picture here.”

“Don’t try to show it to me!”

“Julia, please. I was wondering what sort of clothing he planned to take with him. It could indicate where he was intending to go, whether he got there or not.”

She hesitated, and then with a sigh of resignation she took the picture and turned it toward the light. She closed her eyes for a few moments, then studied it again, and handed it back.

“You can’t learn much from that bush jacket,” she said. “That’s the last one of four he bought at Abercrombie and Fitch at least fifteen years ago. They were made out of their special Safari Cloth. They wore like iron. That was the last one. Shoulder straps. Four pleated pockets with buttons. I remember mending the left sleeve in front. You can see the mend. He ripped it on a branch.”

“Do you know what other clothes he took?”

“I have no idea. He’d moved a lot of his stuff out to the ranch, you know. He was supposed to be sleeping out there.”

“Could you tell by looking to see what’s missing?”

She heaved a great sigh. “Well, I’ve got to go through that stuff sooner or later.”

“Maybe it would be better to put it off for a while.”

“No. I’ll go look. Not that it will do any good.” She came back in five minutes, taking long strides for such a small person. She was bent forward, eyes glaring, jaw set.

“Here, damn you!” she yelled and hurled something at me. I got a hand up in time and caught the wadded cotton. Julie stood over me. “I told him and I told you that goddamn picture was nonsense. Look at it! Look at the sleeve! What did he do, smart man? Wear that to Mexico and sneak back after April eighth and slip it into his closet with the rest of his stuff? I told you. I told everyone. Hub is… is…” She collapsed onto the couch and began to weep.

“Julia? Julia!” I had to say her name very sharply to bring her back for a moment from the selfinvolvement of her tears. She stared at me, her face small, lined; and anguished.

“I agreed to tell you why I came here,” I said.

“If it was to prove he’s really dead…”

“To clear Van Harder. To get his license back. A favor for a friend. That’s all.”

Her stare showed she found it hard to believe. “Just for that? My God, you go plunging around, kicking and thumping, just for that? What kind of an idiot project is that?” Tears were drying.

“Your husband and his dear friend left Harder way up the creek. Harder was loyal to your husband. They gave him a very cheap shot.”

“What do you think he gave me? And his daughters?”

“And his bank and his friends and his other employees too. I guess I stepped in just now because I didn’t want to see some grown person crying for him.”

“He was my husband!”

“When I was small there was a neighborhood kid who had a lot of toys. Whenever we played with him we all knew that whatever the game was, we had to let him win. If we didn’t, he would pick up his toys and leave. He was kind of a fat kid.”

“You’ve got some sort of adolescent infatuation with the idea of gallantry and fair play,” she said. “He was doing what he thought was right. Damn you, why have you got me defending him? Would you leave? Please?”

Sheriff Haggermann Ames saw me in his little sterile windowless office at quarter to four that Monday afternoon.

He looked at the paper bag I brought in. “What have you got?”

“You won’t like it.”

“Would you like a list of the things that happen every day that I don’t like and never expect to like?” I sat opposite him and took the bush jacket out of the bag. I shoved the print he had given me in front of him, unfolded the bush jacket, and pointed to the mended rip in the front of the short left sleeve. His face did not reveal a thing. He told me to stay put. He came back with a slide projector, the kind which comes in a small tin suitcase which opens up into a tent-shaped ground-glass screen. The slide is projected onto the back of the ground glass. He plugged it in, turned it on, inserted the slide, turned it to sharp focus. Then he compared the shirt I’d handed him to the shirt in the photograph. He compared the shoulder straps, collar, mend, the buttons on the flap pockets. He turned the projection lamp off, tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling.

“Get it from Julia?” he asked.

“Yes. She did the mending. He bought four of them a long time ago. This was the last one left.”

“What the hell made you go ask?”

“I don’t know. I began to wonder if too many trails led to Mexico. I wanted her to look and see what sort of things he took. I had the idea that if he took snowshoes and thermal underwear, it might mean people were looking in the wrong place. I sort of fell into this.”

He looked at the shirt as if he wanted to set fire to it. “I fall into things too. They are like accidents, but not quite. Something in the back of a cop’s head keeps nibbling away.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Maybe you should consider it.”

“I don’t think so, Sheriff.”

“Well… where the hell are we? As near as we can tell Hub was down in Mexico sometime in February. Maybe the woman took the picture then and got confused about the date. I don’t like that. She was too positive.”

“She was selling that date. She was selling the idea Hub is alive.”

“And she was steering us toward Guadalajara,” he said. “What if that architect lady wanted the whole pie? What if she was just using Hub? The way I read it, her career wasn’t exactly climbing. Okay, so they meet the morning after he was supposed to drown. Maybe they meet at the place where he stashed the money. I don’t think he jumped overboard with it. She knows the plan is to go to Mexico, get plastic surgery, hole up somewhere, and have a long happy life. But she doesn’t like that kind of risk, being tied to him, maybe caught with him. So she pops him, buries him, and leaves with all the cash. To lay the false trail, she sends the slide to me.”

“If she did that, Sheriff, the best and safest thing she could do would be go back to Atlanta, keep the money hidden away, and pick up the strings of the life she led up there. But there’s been no transactions in checking or savings for two months, and she’s got forty thousand dollars up there in the Atlanta Southern.”

He gave me one of his mild, tired, dusty looks. He scratched the back of his head. “Dig, dig, dig.”

“I was curious about her.”

“Sure. So am I. The couple who subleased her apartment up there are curious too. And she took a leave of absence from the firm she was working with. They are wondering.”

“Mr. Boggs was glad to make the inquiry.”

“Sure. What else do you know you haven’t got around to mentioning?”

“I brought that bush jacket right to you.”

“Yes, you did. And sidestepped the question too.”

“Can I ask a question?”

“Such as?”

“Who paid for Deputy Fletcher’s trip to Guadalajara?”

He focused a bleak stare on the wall behind me and then turned and pushed a button on his intercom. “Pull Fletcher in from wherever, on the double, in my office.”

He looked at me and said, “One thing about Wright Fletcher, he ain’t too god-awful bright on the best of days. The script I’m going to try is that the body just now came ashore, positive ID from the dental work.”

“He was going down to that shack where Tuckerman is staying and putting pressure on Tuckerman until the sister ran him off.”

He smiled. I wouldn’t want him smiling at me like that. “Now that’s nice to know.”

Ten minutes later I had my first look at Wright Fletcher. He was as big as the side of a house. He was as big as Walloway. He came creaking and jingling in, all leather and whipcord and the metallic necessities of office. At Ames’s suggestion, I had moved back into a chair against the wall, almost behind the chair where Fletcher had to sit.

He looked uncomfortable. There were two rolls of sun-baked fat on the back of his neck.

“That was a real nice break for you, flying down to Mexico like that with Mr. Tannoy. You know we could never have pried loose the money to send you down there. And we couldn’t have sent you down official without probably an act of Congress, Wright.”

“Well, Mr. Tannoy really needed me. He doesn’t speak any Spanish at all. I’m not what you’d call fluent, but I was able to help him a lot.”

“That’s nice. I’m glad you were able to help him. And you are one thousand percent sure Hub Lawless is down there?”

“Well… I’m a thousand percent certain he was there. We found that sidewalk cafe place where that picture was taken, about three blocks from the main square, and I took another picture of it and gave it to you.”

“That was a big help. Now let’s say a body came drifting in and we just got a positive on the dental work, and it is Hub Lawless, not looking too good after two months in the water.”

“Honest to God? Did the body come in?”

“Wait a minute, Deputy! You seem pretty ready to believe that it did. I thought you had him all nailed down in Mexico. Is there something the matter with your investigation work down there?”

“N-no, Sheriff. No, there wasn’t nothing wrong.”

“It works out nice for Tannoy if the company doesn’t have to pay off, doesn’t it?”

“I think he gets some kind of a percentage commission.”

“On two point two million! Must be a nice commission.”

“I guess so.”

“Now you had five people on the report you gave me, each ready to swear they saw Lawless down there after March twenty-second. Five good sound reliable witnesses. People we could put on the stand?”

“Well… we didn’t tell them they’d have to do that.”

“Did Mr. Tannoy give them something for their trouble?”

“A couple of hundred pesos, Sheriff. Like about ten dollars. As, you know, a courtesy.”

“I know. He put you up in a good hotel?”

“Very nice.”

“Good food, good booze, a little night life?”

“Aw, Sheriff, like Mr. Tannoy said, it was kind of like a vacation anyway. Nobody should mind if we enjoyed ourselves, as long as we got the job done.”

“Maybe there was a little bonus for you too?”

“Not really a bonus.”

“Well, what?”

“Just a silver belt buckle, for a souvenir.”

“And?”

“Well… a necklace for Madge.”

“Silver?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many people did you talk to who remembered Hub Lawless, but remembered him as being there back in February?”

“Quite a few.”

“Ten?”

“Well, more.”

“I don’t see their names on the report.”

“Mr. Tannoy said they wouldn’t do anybody any good. He said it was all perfectly clear that Hub took off with the money, and it wasn’t right he should get to rip off an insurance company at the same time. He said that whenever people rip off an insurance company, the rates go up for all the rest of us.”

“Get out of here!”

“Sir?”

“Get your fat sly ass out of here, Fletcher. It makes me feel sick to look at you. I’m going to think up an assignment for you you’ll never forget. Git!”

After the door closed, he said, “So much for the Mexican connection. Can’t blame Tannoy too much. A professional company man. Any company that’ll pay him. Where are we now? It would be a pretty safe guess that Hub hasn’t been to Mexico since February. Maybe he sent along the slide. False trail.”

“After going to all the trouble to make it look like accidental drowning?”

“Okay, so then he realized it wasn’t going to work. Remember I didn’t get the note from Orlando with the slide until the tenth of this month, McGee.”

“Nobody was talking about Guadalajara until you got it. So even if he knew what was going on around here, even if somebody was keeping him up to date, the escape route was still safe. And the complete change of appearance was still a good idea.”

Ames thought in silence for a few moments. “We have to remember that he had already missed his appointment at the clinic by the time I got the picture of him.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. “Let’s back up. Who would know about Guadalajara? Lawless, Kristin Petersen, and John Tuckerman. I put in a lot of hours back there toward the end of March, working on John Tuckerman. I couldn’t move him an inch. He wasn’t giving me the story word for word every time. That would have tipped me off. But it was damned close to word for word. All right, so he had to be in on the scheme. Those two were always close. I had to back off. I had nothing to go on. Harder was no help. Those two girls backed up Tuckerman’s story. So if he was in on it, he certainly didn’t get paid off. He had to give up his place. He wrecked his car. He was in the hospital screaming at the big polka-dot lobsters that were crawling all over him and up the walls. What would he get out of sending that slide to me? How would he manage it?”

He took the slide out of the projector. “Number eleven,” he said. “Out of twenty or thirty-six. Developed by Kodak in April. Along with the thirty-nine billion other slides they processed in April.” He looked at his watch. “We can make it to Ben’s Camera House before it closes.”

Eighteen

BEN HAD a florid face and a curly red beard. He said, “Hack, there is absolutely no way to tell a thing about this slide. It is just about perfect exposure, but these days of automatic, through-the-lens, CD cells and all, the exception is when we get things through here that are over or under.

“Now because it has Hub Lawless in the picture, it could be like thousands of other slides and prints that have come through here with the Lawless family on them. They talk about other people having a hard time on account of Hub taking off the way he did-I am the one really hurting. I can’t even guess the thousands and thousands of feet of Super Eight movie film he took of those girls and his wife. And every time Hub went off hunting or fishing or cruising, he’d be back in with a dozen rolls of color to be developed. And he was gadgethappy. I must have sold him forty different cameras over the years. And lenses and tripods and monopods. Flash attachments, viewers, projectors, screens. Name it and he’d buy it. I took back a lot in trade, of course, but I can tell you Julia had a lot left out there for that garage sale. I went out and helped her price it out to move it, and I hear they did well getting rid of it at the prices I suggested.”

“Did John Tuckerman ever bring the film in and pick it up?” the Sheriff asked.

“John? Sure. He was Hub’s errand boy. It would be more often John than Hub when it came to picking up film.”

“Did John take any of his own?”

“You know, I don’t think he owned a camera. I know he used to take some pictures sometimes, for Hub, when Hub wanted himself in the picture, like with a big fish, something like that. Snapshots. Aim and fire. Maybe he owned a camera. Maybe Hub gave him one. But John never seemed much interested.”

“Did John pick up any film after Hub disappeared?”

“No. There wasn’t any here. Hub stuck me for a hundred and something dollars on the books, an open account, when he took off.”

“Did Hub get his pictures developed soon after he took them?”

Ben laughed. “Nearly always. But the man had too many cameras. And he had a habit of leaving exposed film in the cameras and forgetting what it was taken of. You can’t do that with professional film and expect to get much. But you can leave amateur color film in a long time and not lose much. They know people tend to leave film in their cameras. They build it to last.”

“So this slide here, developed in April, that could be a picture taken in February?”

“Or even last year sometime. I can tell you this wouldn’t have come through my store here, seeing as how it is April, and assuming it was Hub’s. It wouldn’t have to go through any retail store, you know. A person can buy a slide mailer and send it to Kodak and get the slides back in the mail.”

“Did Hub use those mailers?”

“Sometimes he bought some, when he was going to be away awhile. He’d mail in the film and then the slides would be waiting at home for him when he got home.”

The Sheriff drove me back to the courthouse, where I had parked. I sat in his car with him for a few minutes. “What we’ve got so far, based on too damn many assumptions,” he said, “we’ve got Hub in Guadalajara in early February, with John Tuckerman. We know they went down there hunting cat, but we didn’t know they went to Guadalajara. We got Hub asking John to take a picture of the street there, with Hub over to the left. He isn’t even looking into the camera, like a man does when his picture is being taken. What would make John want to sneak a picture way back then?”

“Maybe in the next slide, number twelve, Hub Lawless is smiling into the camera. Maybe John took it too soon.”

“Why would there be any picture taking anyway?”

“You mean if they-if Hub-was planning the escape route, setting up the clinic appointment, and all? I suppose he was trying to stick with his normal routines. He always took pictures. He always came home from trips with pictures.”

“Maybe Tuckerman got it developed and managed to mail one print from Orlando. Too much, McGee. Too damned thin. Too damned improbable. And why the hell would John Tuckerman want to screw up Hub’s plans after helping him carry them out?”

“Because he didn’t like getting the short end.”

“You’re getting along with him all right?”

“Pretty good.”

“Maybe you could see if he wants to talk any photography or if he acts funny. Just to satisfy your own curiosity?”

“Not yours?”

“No. If I wanted to learn anything about anything, all I have to do is have Deputy Fletcher saddle up and ride. Besides, I’m not permitted to deputize anybody unless we have a declared state of emergency.”

“Sheriff, if I happen to find out anything I think you might want to know, I might want to tell you about it.” I had my hand on the car door, ready to get out.

“Set quiet one minute longer, McGee.”

“Yes, sir!”

“You could aggravate me pretty good if you put your mind to it, McGee. Be that as it may. I dropped by to see a man this morning, and he swore up and down you told him you were a lawyer.”

“No way!”

“Stanley Moran.”

“Oh. I told him I’d lay a subpoena on him if he didn’t behave. I didn’t pretend to be a lawyer. He asked me if I was a lawyer. I didn’t answer the question.”

“It bothers me, too, the way that architect lady up and left so sudden. Looked like she packed up and left and drove over to Orlando and flew out, never to come back. Meant to look like that, you think?”

“I don’t know exactly what you mean.”

“This morning I looked at the stuff she left behind. I wondered if it was anything worth taking with her. I borrowed the painting she left. Only so big. Hardly bigger than a legal-size piece of paper. Frame is light. It had the name of a gallery down in Clearwater on it, on the back. Can’t pronounce the name of the artist. The title was Tide Watch. I phoned the gallery about it and they said it was purchased by a Miss Petersen in January of this year for seven hundred and fifty dollars, plus tax. It would fit in a suitcase easy, between clothes. A fifty-dollar painting, a hundred-dollar painting, a person could be so absentminded on account of wanting to leave in a hurry, they could overlook it. But seven hundred and fifty dollars?”

“And a person could pack her stuff, put it in her car, drive to Orlando, buy a cheap ticket, check the stuff aboard, leave the car at the airport, miss the flight, take a bus to practically anyplace, and the luggage would end up in an airline warehouse somewhere.”

“Which fits nice with the information she hasn’t touched her checking account since before the twenty-second of March, over two months.”

“Or, if you are in a rush and traveling light, why bother with a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar painting when you are on the run with eight hundred thousand or so?”

“If somebody knew the entire scam, McGee, if they intercepted Hub and his new lady, took the money, buried them deep, then pulled that picture trick to steer everybody toward Mexico…”

“Somebody like?”

“I know. I know. Not like Tuckerman. Certainly not Julia Lawless.”

For a moment, for one moment, I was tempted to tell him what I had learned from Gretel and John about the whole scheme as devised by Hub, and about the heart attack the yellow jeep, the message John took to Kristin Petersen. But Gretel had trusted me, and she had induced John to trust me. If my luck ran really bad, one day this dusty dangerous little man would find out what I had held back and find out I had held it back. In a perfectly ordinary manner, with his ordinary face and gestures and tone of voice, he had a knack of creating a respect that bordered on dread.

In late afternoon I aimed the gray Dodge Dart southward, pretending I was intent on my mission of involving John Tuckerman in some small talk about photography. But Gretel filled my head, and I leafed through the hundred pictures of her, taken by a personal invisible camera which had produced instant three-dimensional colored shots,. vivid, never fading. I whistled. I decided that the unraveling of the Hubbard Lawless mystery was just a nervous reflex on my part. None of my business. Van Harder would be absolved and relicensed. The Sheriff was willing to arrange that without much further urging.

For all of me, the whole area could strangle in angel dust. All I wanted to do was find some way to pick up my woman and run, preferably in the Busted Flush, once Van Harder had turned her back over to me.

I steered around the deeper potholes. The sun was sliding down the sky, off to my right. A rabbit sat up and stopped munching as I drove slowly by. There was a small hawk perched on the mailbox, and it went arrowing off as I turned in. Soon the stilt house was in view, with the square green Fiat still parked under it. I popped the horn ring a couple of times as I drove into the yard. I got out and looked up, expecting to see her come out onto the veranda. Empfiy. There was not the slightest breath of a breeze. There was not the slightest stir of leaves or grass. Nor any bird sound.

The creak of the weathered stairs seemed loud as I went quickly up to the veranda deck.

“Hallo? Hey! Gretel? John?” Nothing.

I walked around to the Gulf side of the deck, looking in the windows as I passed them. I tried the screen door and it opened. The table was set for two. There was driftwood and paper in the fireplace, ready to light against the possible evening chill.

“Hallo?”

I noticed the old ten-power binoculars. They were on the deck, looking as if they had fallen from the rough railing. I picked them up, thinking that probably Gretel and her brother were somewhere along the beach and I would be able to spot them. When I tried to look through them, it felt as if my left eye was being pulled out of the socket. Apparently they had fallen, and the prisms inside the left half had been knocked a little out of line.

There were clouds on the horizon, the sun moving down toward them. Squinting against the sun, I looked through the right half, adjusting it to my vi sion. I swept the beach off to the right and saw no one. I swept around to the left, looking south, and saw no one. I saw something against the concave seaward slope of a dune where the beach swung slightly westward. The sun made a bright glare against that angle of sand. I braced the binoculars against one of the uprights that supported the overhanging roof, made an additional adjustment to the focus, lost the object, found it again, and suddenly saw that it was a figure flattened against the sand, face down. It was a female, I thought. It was Gretel. It was too far away for anybody to be sure it was even female. I would have needed a forty-power spotting scope on a tripod to make it out properly. It could not be Gretel. But I was over the dune and on the beach and running hard on the packed sand, groaning as I ran, still telling myself it was not Gretel, running with no clear memory of ever having left the veranda.

It is curious how many things can go on in your mind simultaneously. If it was Gretel, she was sunbathing. She was upslope to present a better angle to the late sun. Of course. She would laugh when I came running at her like a maniac. (But she had looked too flat and too still.) A person can fall asleep in the sun. (Face down in the sand?)

When I was fifty yards from her, I heard that flat, sharp, lathe-snapping noise which a small-caliber high-velocity rifle shot makes in the open air. I had the general impression it was fired from somewhere in front of me, somewhere beyond where Gretel lay. I made two more long running strides before, simultaneously with the second crisp, abrupt sound, something tugged at the short sleeve of my sport shirt and burned my upper right arm.

I plunged through soft sand, away from the wet packed beach sand, running as I had been taught long ago, moving without pattern from side to side, keeping low, and feeling once again that area of belly-coldness which seems to mark the spot where the whistling slug will impact. I dived and scrambled the last twenty feet, rolling fast to end up close to Gretel. There had been nobody on the beach, nobody visible on the dunes. The rifleman had to be up on the crest, just over the crest, peering over to aim and fire. Here the slope was so steep that when I looked up I could not see the crest, only a smooth round of sand partway up the slope.

Her dark hair was matted to a chocolate thickness at the crown of her head. Two green-bellied flies walked on her hair. Her face was turned slightly away from me. Her fingers were stubbed into the sand as though she had been trying to pull herself up the slope. She wore rust-colored shorts and a white T-shirt, dappled on the back with the brownish spots of dried blood. She wore one white boat shoe. On the left foot.

A great desolation chilled my heart. It was an emptiness stretching from here to infinity, from now to eternity.

Slowly, slowly the whole world was suffused with that strange orange glow which happens rarely toward sunset. The clouds turned to gold as the sun moved behind them, and the reflection of the clouds colored the earth. I have never seen the Gulf so quiet. There were no ripples, no birds, no sign of feeding fish, no offshore vessels moving across the horizon. I had seen this strange coppery light in Tahiti, in Ceylon (before it became Sri Lanka), and in Granada and the Grenadines. The world must have looked like that before the first creatures came crawling out of the salt water to spawn on the empty land. I turned my head and saw, beyond the shoulder of my beloved, the empty copper sea, hushed and waiting, as if the world had paused between breaths. Perhaps it was like this in the beginning, and will be like this again, after man has slain every living thing. Sand, heat, and water. And death.

A lone gull came winging in across the water, angling in, at a height just sufficient for him to clear the ridge of the dune.

The gull would have crossed the crest about two hundred feet ahead of me and to my right. When he neared the crest he suddenly squawked alarm and veered to the left of his line of flight and sharply upward before flying on.

So there he was. X. For unknown. The rifleman. I raised up very quickly and dropped flat again. If you lift slowly, you give them time to put a third eye in the center of your forehead. I retained the afterimage of the empty crest. Nothing. No glint of metal. No round shape of head or bulk of shoulders. Just the wind-smoothed tan sand. I took another look. And another. Nothing at all.

The terrain promised no advantage. I could not hope to run up the slope. I could get up there to the crest by churning and floundering and clawing my way up through the coarse sliding sand, as easy to shoot as a deer in deep snow. I could make good time down the slope, right down to the open beach, where I would make a pretty good target there as well. I could move laterally, but not very far. The slight concavity which hid me from the crest grew shallower to my left and was gone within twenty feet. Ten feet to my left I saw an object protruding from the sand, the end of something thrown up by a storm of long ago. It looked as if it might be wood, but it was difficult to tell in that golden-red glow. I wanted a stick, a stone, a switch-anything. It is an ancient instinct. Man is the tool user. Even as the saber-toothed tiger was disemboweling him, man was reaching for a branch to club the beast. It did not matter that nothing I could find on a beach would help me ward off the tiger or the bullet, I wanted something in hand. A tool. Comfort of a kind.

I edged over to it. Wood. A good shape and size for grasping. Was it too short or too long? Too short to use, too long to extricate from the sand? I worked it back and forth and pulled it free. It was the handle end of a canoe paddle. The piece was two feet long. I had grasped it near the break. On the other end, the end normally grasped, there were dead barnacles, tough, sharp, and firmly seated.

It had an incongruity like the red light that filled the beach. Canoes were summer lakes, frocks, big hats, and music coming across the water.

The initial panic had settled into a reliable flow of adrenaline. It is my fate and my flaw to have learned too long ago that this is what I am about. This is when I am alive and know it most completely. Every sense is honed by the knowledge of the imminence of death. The juices flow. In the back of my mind I tried to tell myself that I had been turned into a murderous machine by the sight of Gretel. But it was rationalization. There was a hard joy in this acceptance of a total risk. I knew that if he got me-whoever he might be-he was going to have to be very damned good at it, and even then I was going to create some astonishment in him. I would live totally on this thin edge until it was over, and then I would either be dead for good or partially dead until the next time.

The copper sea made no sound at all. I eeled slowly upslope, angling to my right, knowing that I would be exposed to him, would be in his line of fire before I could reach the crest. I worked it slowly, peering toward the area where the bird had veered. I kept muscles poised and bunched so that in an instant I could hurl myself back and to the left, hoping to fall back into the sanctuary of the concavity near Gretel. As I came closer to the crest, I diminished the chance of regaining the concavity undamaged. On the other hand, it was easier to watch for him. Or her. Or them. Or it. The dune was about fifty feet high, much higher than in front of the shack. Perhaps if someone suddenly appeared to fire at me again, at shorter range, it might be better to plunge over the crest, race and roll down the shaded side, taking a chance of finding some kind of cover.

At last I was close to the crest. The wind had given it a sharp, wandering edge. I was, on about a fifty-degree slope. I dug my fingers into the sand just short of the ridge. My chin touched the sand. I was absolutely certain that somebody was waiting, alert, ready for the target to appear above the ridge, silhouetted against the slow-motion bonfire of the sky.

So I worked my legs up under me, adjusted my grip on the piece of paddle, and began to take slow, deep breaths. In the total silence of the world, mW best way to get over was to bound over, letting out a yell which would shock the rifleman into a momentary rigidity, or into panicky unaimed shots. There was the hesitation much like that remembered from childhood, standing on the edge of a roof, a reluctance to make the first commitment.

In that great stillness a monstrous breathing sound began. A great snuffling intake, and then a long breathing sign. Snuff sigh. Snuff-sigh. Snuff sigh. As though a winded dragon lay beyond the ridge, slightly to my right and far down the landward side of the dune. It was very steady and regular. I tried to identify that sound. It seemed, somehow, very homely and familiar. Suddenly there was a metallic clank at the end of the snuffing sound, a hesitation before the sigh.

I knew then what the sound was. It had been unfamiliar only because it was so incongruous when compared with my state of tension. There could be two of them, of course. It was still a time for caution, but a time to discard the large bad idea of bounding over the rim and down the slope, yelling and waving my paddle.

I dropped back a little and then moved laterally until I was directly above that breathing sound. And then, instinctively holding my breath, I looked over the edge.

It was darker on the landward side of the dune. The red light that bathed the world was all shadows and wine.

There, below me, John Tuckerman shoveled the dry, loose sand. Chuff of the shovel blade into the sand, then the soft sound, like an exhalation, as he swung the sand out in an arc behind him. As he dug, the sand slid down the slope, rivulets filling some of the space he had shoveled. The muscles of his back and shoulders and upper arms slid and bulged under the sun-scorched flab. He worked with the metronomic energy of the demented. He was naked. It was a labor assigned in hell. From the blazing sunburn on his body, and from the look of the piles of sand he had shoveled, he had been at it all day.

He was excavating the yellow jeep. It was aimed south, parallel to the ridge. The wheels and fenders on the right side of the vehicle, in fact the whole right side of it, was still covered by the slide of brown coarse sand. There was a figure behind the steering wheel. It sat, arms in its lap, chin on its chest, looking like a crude sand sculpture made of a slightly darker shade of sand. An imperceptible movement of the air brought the faint, sweet, gassy stink of decay, and I nearly gagged as I realized that the sand was darker because it was clotted by the fluids released by the tissues. In the passenger seat a slight knob had begun to appear, in just the right place and the right size to be the back of a head.

I looked for the rifle, finally saw it about thirty feet beyond the front of the jeep, leaning against a leafless stunted bush.

He stopped shoveling. He spoke at conversational pitch, but in a strange tone of voice, a sweet wheedling tone pitched so much higher than his normal tone that he sounded almost like a woman.